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

[seth vidal]

On Fri, 2004-12-03 at 17:22 +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-12-03 at 12:29 +0100, Dag Wieers wrote:
> 
> > > 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.
> 
> The problem is with the multilib monster and RH packaging, not yum. If
> the you have libfoo.i386 and libfoo.x86_64 which don't share any files
> then installing separately is not a problem. However several such
> packages in FC and RHEL do have common files, in which case installing
> them separately fails with file conflicts (and you need to use --force
> to override, sometimes with "interesting" results) but if they're
> installed simultaneously rpmlib just "swallows" the conflict. Multilib
> isn't called sick without a reason...

There's also an issue of consistency of interface:

yum splits the concept of acceptable arches for into two branches ,
right now, which is more or less the 64bit arches and the 32bit arches

That's so it can compare the 32bit arches against each either to find
the 'best' one for 32bit and the same for the 64bit arches. But so
they're not compared against each other.

so since yum install foo on an i686 installs the best arch of foo for
the arch branches available - it stands to reason, at least to me, that
you'd want BOTH multiarch branches on a multiarch machine.

If you want to be more specific then you should specify the arch on the
command line: 
yum install foo.x86_64

this also makes a bit more sense when you compare it to the remove
command:

yum remove foo

will remove all the installed archs.

not just the 64bit arch

-sv