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

[Dag Wieers]

On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, 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...

But these packages with common files that have existed before don't suffer 
from the same problem as is the case with multilib packages ? Couldn't the 
same work-around be implemented, whatever that is/was ?

I'm sure there's room for doing it differently than what rpm allows, ie. 
rpm is very strict about some other things that have been successfully 
hidden from end-users in the past. Not handling this better (then 
installing both) is a burden for repository maintainers and often even 
impossible to satisfy. (ie. there's not automatic way to know that mozilla 
plugins should be included as i386 too).

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