[repo-coord] Re: nVidia rpms ...

[Dag Wieers]

On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, Axel Thimm wrote:

> This kind of bug is probably of interest to all multiarch repo
> maintainers, Ccing repo-coord.
> 
> On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 12:06:17PM +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 12:38:06PM +0200, C.Lee Taylor wrote:
> > > 	I will, seeing that I just did a ...
> > > 
> > > yum --enablerepo=at-stable install 
> > > kernel-module-nvidia-graphics6629-`uname -r` nvidia-graphics6629
> > > 
> > > 	I did get a few errors,
> > 
> > Hm, something about /usr/lib/nvidia-graphics-helpers/nvidia-config-x.py? 
> > 
> > In this case call
> > 
> > /usr/lib64/nvidia-graphics-helpers/nvidia-config-x.py
> > 
> > and move the generated /etc/X11/xorg.conf.nvidia over to
> > /etc/X11/xorg.conf (after checking that the changes are OK).
> 
> The reason for the bug above is that I am placing all i386 rpms into
> the x86_64 repo as well. yum (and perhaps up2date?) always installs
> both rpms if not explicitely told the arch.
> 
> Probably yum's behaviour is correct, the assumption is that a x86_64
> repo only contains those compatibility packages that are really
> required. If you need more, you can still include an i386 repo
> directly.
> 
> So perhaps we should carefully decide which i386 packages to add to
> x86_64 repos? It would be interesting to know how Red Hat decided
> which packages to offer as i386 compatibility packages. Probably all
> openoffice depends on, but perhaps there are more.

I refuse. The behaviour of Yum is clearly broken, people do not expect to 
have all binary archs installed just because they are available and the 
arch is unspecified. People are not supposed to know in what archs a 
package comes.

There are many reasons why the current design is broken from a user point 
of view. A user does not know what architectures are available, nor does 
he know whether a package is binary or noarch. It should not matter to 
him, if he needs a package, Yum should first try x86_64, then i386, then 
noarch. Unless arch is explicitly specified (either on commandline or by 
dependency)

Furthermore, it's problematic to only provide what _your_ packages 
require. This means you cannot provide i386 packages for whatever other 
application might need.

I've taken this up with Seth a few days after the release of FC3 and it 
was apparently intentionally designed like that and we had the usual 
Yum-squarel.

This is yet another item forcing the burden on repository maintainers 
where the tool could allow for much more flexibility and less problems.
Besides, there is no tool currently that offers a solution for repository 
maintainers, and it's impossible to handle this manually.

--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]