FC6 - Stock x86_64 stock install, installs about 158 i386/686 rpm's

[Hans de Goede]

Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Jesse Keating <jkeating <at> redhat.com> writes:
>> And those users that actually care can remove them easily enough.
> 
> Only if the RPM problem gets fixed...
> 

Lets try to focus on the rpm problem then, which is far worse then the
default multilib behaviour. The default multilib behaviour does make
sense, try installing google earth after removing all i?86 packages.

Now can we please get some progress on the rpm issue? Let me repeat myself:

---

> It shouldn't, and that's why it's a bug. (:
> > http://bugzilla.redhat.com/140055

Yes and a bug that needs fixing, its also here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=209306

Where I've suggested a reasonable workaround, the problem is that
currently rpm doesn't check if  a file has multiple owners but just
removes it if a package owning it gets removed, when this file is under
one of the following dirs:
    _skip("/usr/share/zoneinfo"),
    _skip("/usr/share/locale"),
    _skip("/usr/share/i18n"),
    _skip("/usr/share/doc"),
    _skip("/usr/lib/locale"),
    _skip("/usr/src"),
    _skip("/lib/modules"),


This is known as the skipdirs patch, which was added because otherwise
rpm's resident mem usage when doing rpm -e on a kernel when you have say
20+ kernels installed could become over 1Gig, which is a but of a
problem on 512Mb or less machines.

The real fix for this would be to fix rpm's absurd mem usage in this
scenarion but that isn't easily doable, thus I've suggested to reduce
the skipdirs list to:
    _skip("/usr/share/zoneinfo"),
    _skip("/usr/share/i18n"),
    _skip("/usr/lib/locale"),
    _skip("/usr/src"),
    _skip("/lib/modules"),

Notice how the following 2 dirs where removed from the list:
    _skip("/usr/share/locale"),
    _skip("/usr/share/doc"),

Removing these 2 dirs is unlikely to trigger the Gig memusage scenario
again, while at the same time reducing the impact of this problem to
almost zero.

Unfortunately nobody sofar has responded to my suggestion to, as an
intermediate solution remove these 2 dirs from the skipdirs list, thus
reducing the impact of this bug to almost 0.

---

And (gee surprise) even here on the mailing list again noone responded
to my serious and motivated suggestion, that sucks and leads me to
believe that rpm (the foundation of our believed distribution) is
currently an unmaintained piece of crap. Is it really? Does really no
one care about rpm??

Regards,

Hans