Comment 16 for bug 248392

@Dan Nicholson: Sticking 64-bit libraries into /usr/lib64 instead of /usr/lib would require changing Debian's packaging policy as well as every derivative of Debian's policy to accomodate one library that won't work otherwise.

I'm not actually sure about what the case is like for GStreamer. However, the approach I am proposing is actually used within Gtk for loading modules which are usually found in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0 (i.e. it also searches within /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/<GTK_HOST> where GTK_HOST is defined to the $host found from configure. In fact, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ia32-libs/+bug/369498 is what I was referring to when I came up with the patch.

@Corbin Simpson: The compile time flag --with-dri-driverdir would fail if I set more than one path there, e.g. /usr/lib/dri:/usr/lib/dri/i486-pc-linux-gnu, and the LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH environment variable would require that every 64-bit user running 32-bit OpenGL applications set the environment variable, which is hardly what I would consider appropriate.

Also, you both were mentioning "changing the defaults". The patch I propose does not change the defaults, it just adds an extra search path. The original search path is preserved.

Either way, if you wouldn't mind committing a patch that changes the path via a configure argument, then I'll just write up a patch that does that instead.