Why all the i686 dependencies when installing x64 wine?

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Kevin Martin <kevintm at ameritech.net> wrote:
> When I try to install x64 wine (I'm trying to remove all of the i686/i486 packages from my x64 Fedora install), I see the following:
<snip output>
>
> Why are there so many i686 multilib dependencies?  Is there some way to make it only install x86_64 versions?

By default, the "wine" package brings in the 32-bit wine stack,
because ~95% of Windows applications are 32-bit only, and the i686
wine stack is required to run 32-bit Windows applications.  You can
remove the i686 stack, but everything in "~/.wine/drive_c/Program
Files (x86)" will cease to work.  If that's empty or you can replace
them with 64-bit versions, you'll be fine.

To remove the i686 stack, first remove the "wine" package, which is
simply a metapackage that drags in both the i686 and x86_64 wine
stacks.  (The actual meat of wine is in the "wine-core" package.)  You
can then remove all the i686 wine packages and leave the x86_64
packages intact.

-T.C.