This is a deep topic and highly convoluted, but I will take a shot at asking
here.

First some quick Background info. When compiling WINE (http://winhq.com) on a
64-bit machine and also want to build WINE that runs 32-bit applications there
are some peculiarities. First there is the running 32-bit windows apps and what
one needs to do (the easy part), a summary of which is here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/136714/how-to-force-wine-into-acting-like-32-bit-windows-on-64-bit-ubuntu
My primary issue is _compiling_ WINE to do the above, which is much trickier.
A summary of the hurdles to jump are here:
https://wiki.winehq.org/Building_Wine (look under "Multi-Arch and Multi-lib")

The question itself is tricky for the vanilla user: has anybody here turned a
non-multi-lib distro to a multi-lib? where there any apparent issues? and has
anybody done what I am trying to do? Which distros are multilib when vanilla?


As a Slackware user, which does not come multi-lib out of the box, I need to
jump some hoops. Thankfully, one of the slack people has apparently streamlined
it all for us: https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:multilib
And there is also this:
http://gnu-linux-slackware.blogspot.com/2013/01/switch-to-multilib-with-32-bit.html

Is any Slackware user here who has done this?

I am not worried about ruining the system. I dropped a copy of it in a
different partition, edited the /etc/fstab and added an entry in grub.conf to
boot with root=.... etc. I'd hate to find no issues at first only to find
out later, after a full switch, that something has gone wrong. That is why I
am asking.

Thanks.