@alaviss in reply to #17325 (comment)

If you want to upgrade the ubuntu version @timotheecour, please upgrade it for all architectures.

I"m not sure it"s a good idea to upgrade on both 64 and 32 bits, if anything it increases coverage by ensuring we can still work with ubuntu16.04. The azure CI code for 64bit is clean (unlike the one for "ubuntu-16.04" which has complexity due to azure not having 32 bit VM"s). If there"s some concrete limitation from using ubuntu 16.04 instead of ubuntu 18.04 on 64 bit (or if CI would be slower etc), we could re-consider this but I don"t think that"s the case.

In the future I"ll enginner a docker image as CI for nim, which should avoid all of these stupid issues with apt.

ya that"d be great; it doesn"t have to be an either/or thing also; a docker-based job could be added to existing ones eg to bundle extra dependencies for running certain tests

merging this to unbreak nim CI; followup PR"s can be made if we find a better way to support i386 with keeping ubuntu 16.04

@timotheecour We now have:

sudo apt-fast update -qq

sudo apt-fast install --no-install-recommends --allow-downgrades -yq g++-multilib gcc-multilib libcurl4-openssl-dev:i386 libgc-dev:i386 libsdl1.2-dev:i386 libsfml-dev:i386 libglib2.0-dev:i386 libffi-dev:i386
[apt-fast 09:42:55]
[apt-fast 09:42:55]Working... this may take a while.
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
[apt-fast 09:42:55]Package manager quit with exit code.

Any idea what"s going on, i.e. how to fix it?

IIUC Upstream packages for i386 were broken for multiple days; the upstream problem may have has been fixed in the meantime, in any case this I don"t think those problems are/were caused by this PR