On Fri, 05 Dec 2025 at 15:26:50 +0000, James Addison wrote:
It seems unlikely to me that [an amd64 system with an i386 foreign architecture] would have both sudo:amd64 and sudo:i386 installed
This isn't possible. sudo is not Multi-Arch: same, so you can only have one instance of it at a time. (Each architecture's instance of sudo contains a different /usr/bin/sudo, so it is impossible for more than one to coexist.)
hopefully even less likely that only sudo:i386 is installed
This is possible. Realistically, this would only happen if the user specifically asked for it, or if they did an incomplete crossgrade from i386, or if they installed an i386 package that Depends or Recommends on sudo while not already having sudo:amd64 installed.
The first two of those options are at least arguably user error, and the last seems unlikely to me: the typical use-cases for an i386 foreign architecture on an amd64 system (Wine, Steam, cross-compilers) don't have a reason to depend on sudo.
smcv