Multiarch crazyiness

Michael Schroeder mls at suse.de
Mon Oct 22 09:02:17 UTC 2007


On Sun, Oct 21, 2007 at 10:18:37PM +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.

We (SUSE) create extra '-32bit' packages from the 32bit versions that
just contain the needed files (i.e. libs, no doc). As an example,
we have

zlib.i586          the 32bit version
zlib-32bit.x86_64  a subset of the 32bit version
zlib.x86_64        the 64bit version

The big advantage is that don't need to have two packages with
the same name installed, thus no kludges are needed in the solver.
The downside is that the extra packages need a bit more space.

Cheers,
  Michael.

-- 
Michael Schroeder                                   mls at suse.de
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF Markus Rex, HRB 16746 AG Nuernberg
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