Strange i386/x86_64 behavior

[seth vidal]

On Mon, 2005-04-11 at 20:30 +0200, Matthias Saou wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm currently recompiling a bunch of packages for RHEL4 x86_64 and finally
> tried out the latest mach+yum snapshot. After quite a few problems with %
> pre scriplets failing, and packages being skipped, I finally got a build
> root working.
> 
> I've rebuilt quite a few packages, no problems until I tried php...
> 
> I get a few i386 packages installed, for a reason that is beyond me! It's
> 100% reproducible :
> 
> - If I specify only the package names, the i386 versions get installed :-(
> 
> I'm really confused as to why yum chooses to install those i386 files when
> the arch isn't specified... I'll try to get yum to be more verbose and try
> to find out.

it's intended behavior.

yum will install the highest version and best arch of all packages for
each multilib 'branch' available for the specified package name.

so if you just specify foo

and foo.i686, foo.x86_64 and foo.i386 are available then yum will
install:
 foo.i686
 foo.x86_64

yum resolves packages to install based on the multilib sets. so 64bit
resolved against 64bit and 32bit against 32bit. They aren't compared
against each other.

-sv