Glenn Morris said...

|... in other words, I guess I'm supposed to be able to _run_ i386
|binaries on x86_64, but not _compile_ them. (Though it does seem odd
|to me that the libfoo.so symlinks get relegated to the devel
|packages).

I haven't tried this specific case, but in
general if the correct (32 bit) libraries
are available, you should be able to do
this with compiler and linker flags.  After
all, you can cross-compile and link for
completely different platforms that way...