Fedora Core 3

[Paul Jakma]

On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Jeremy Katz wrote:

> Except that anything that ends up with different paths for binaries 
> isn't exactly sane ;)

Well, it's slightly less insane than the alternative, which is to 
have both i386 and x86_64 RPMs install binaries to the same 
directory. Given that the idea (i guess) was to allow installation of 
i386 RPMs with the minimum of pain (ie not having to go back and 
modify all i386 RPMs presumably), x86_64 I think possibly should have 
gone with bin64 directories. It would have avoided the 
glibc/gcc/binutils/etc.. i386/x86_64 problems where both RPMs wish to 
install binaries to .../bin.

I havnt yet managed to get x86_64 RPM gcc package to build -m32 
binaries without installing conflicting RPMs, and in using yum to 
install the needed i386 packages i ended up with quite a few i386 
binaries in my bin/ directories that previously had been x86_64.

> Sure, you get them both installed, but switching between them is 
> impossible (not to mention problems with things like "what does the 
> menu item for gedit launch?")

Well, that'd be determined by PATH surely, it would even allow one to 
express a preference for i386 vs x86_64. How do i install both 32 and 
64 bit versions of binaries?

I agree it's ugly, but it's less worse (IMHO) to have bin32 (which 
wouldnt work for existing i386 RPMs i guess) or else bin64 for a 
multiarch system, and guarantees i386 and x86_64 packages wont 
clobber each other (yum and rpm at moment are quite happy to allow 
i386 packages to clobber x86_64).

My preference in an ideal world would be for bin/, lib/ simply to be 
defined as always being native, maybe having a /usr/$ARCH/{bin,lib} 
directory scheme for i386 ABI stuff (ARCH = i386 or ia32, whatever 
people prefer.) or alternatively to fix up all the RPMs so that 
config files and docs are in seperate RPMs from libraries which 
should be in seperate RPMs from binaries and make rpm and/or yum not 
allow RPMs to clobber each other's files, regardless of arch. (the 
latter approach still wouldnt allow me to install both 32 and 64 
versions of software though).

I dont know the answer exactly, but the current situation is 
annoying.

> Jeremy

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
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