Rainer Duffner wrote:
Why are there so many i386-rpms in the x86_64 release anyway?Wouldn't it be better to make everything 64bit and just leave out the few things that can't yet compile?Who needs OpenOffice on a server anyway?
Rainer,I can't speak to your other questions, but I can tell you why our company needs i386 libs on x86_64.
Most of our servers run OSS in RPM form only, and on those machines we don't need the i386 libs. But we have a few machines that run proprietary, vendor-supplied binaries that are compiled for the i386 architecture only. These software, though important, don't warrant their own i386 architecture servers. In fact, we're running a lot of things in virtual servers, and with the vendor-supplied xen software, running i386 guests on an x86_64 host hasn't been very stable.
So, this is one usage case for you. John