Multiarch crazyiness

[Jon Masters]

On Sun, 2007-10-21 at 22:18 +0100, Ian Chapman wrote:
> Hans de Goede wrote:
> 
> > The current multilib solution in rpm is far from pretty, it works well, 
> > but definitively has downsides. I think as is its a reasonable 
> > comprimise, lets not add bandaids and patches to it for issues which 
> > should be solved elsewhere, I feel the pain of maintainers getting these 
> > bugs (I got 15 of them), but they are fixable without requiring the 
> > addition of yet another multilib kludge to rpm.
> 
> Well the question is still really where should these issues ultimately 
> be solved? Is kludging the rpms any more elegant than patching rpm? I 
> must admit I have no idea how other distro's deal with these kind of 
> issues.

Without ranting aimlessly, IMO the only real solution is to stop
kludging rpm, yum, etc. and split out multilib libraries properly - and
if needed, seek and get approval for a bin64/bin32 with alternatives
system. Hacking RPM to simply ignore the fact that two packages provide
the same file is not the solution.

AFAIK, the only things in the way of a real solution are:

* Standards. These can be changed/updated.
* Packages. These can be fixed.

I'll shutup now ;-)

Jon.