add a dedicated i386 build node instead of cross compiling
my qusetion "afaiu tooling utilises docker and chef to server up jenkins-slaves. would it be feasible to serve up a minimal amd64 node that runs an i386 image under a hypervisor (xen or qemu/kvm). it could just spit out i386 packages for any libraries that are backported. jenkins even has a shiny libvirt plugin https://plugins.jenkins.io/libvirt-slave/"
notes from talking to sitter:
no need for emulation I think. one would just need to create a i386 docker image the kernel being amd64 probably makes no diff
runs https://github.com/pangea-project/pangea-tooling/blob/master/mgmt/docker.rb on every server, which runs https://github.com/pangea-project/pangea-tooling/blob/master/lib/mgmt/deployer.rb which is a glorified docker run && docker tag, it docker runs https://github.com/pangea-project/pangea-tooling/blob/master/deploy_in_container.sh which bootstraps itself on top of the base ubuntu image before then running https://github.com/pangea-project/pangea-tooling/blob/master/deploy_in_container.rake to turn the base ubuntu image into a pangea image
for the ephemeral CI nodes it's more or less the same except it's build.neon.kde.org's mgmt_digital-ocean job, or some name lilke that, who manages the image. it provisions a new node, then runs https://github.com/pangea-project/pangea-tooling/blob/master/mgmt/digital_ocean/deploy_tooling.sh which in turn runs the aformentioned docker magic to update the docker image, it then pulls a digitalocean image off of that node to serve as base image for the ephemeral nodes