yum pulling in 386 packages

David Woodhouse dwmw2 at infradead.org
Mon Sep 24 13:26:01 UTC 2007


On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 07:23 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> Quite simply, we want both runtime library and development package
> availability of the secondary arch installed by default.

We missed a step here. Why on earth would we want this? Users _don't_
seem to want this.

As far as I can tell, the only time this is useful is to work around the
fact that RPM dependencies aren't arch-specific. 

That is: at the moment, if I want to build foo.i386 and it says
'BuildRequires: bar-devel', that requirement will be 'satisfied' by the
existence of bar-devel.x86_64. And my 'foo' package won't actually
build. That's also on the multilib tracker bug, btw -- bug #235755.

With RPM fixed so that Requires and BuildRequires can actually pull in
the package which is _needed_, I don't see any benefit of having all the
secondary-arch stuff installed by default.

When you install Skype.i386.rpm on an x86_64 box, the dependencies will
work and you'll get the libraries you want.

When you want to build evolution.i386 on an x86_64 box, you'll probably
have to install a bunch of xxx-devel.i386 packages -- but that's fine.
Unless we're going to have a policy of "install _every_ -devel package
in every available flavour", you're often going to have to install a few
packages to satisfy dependencies. There's no problem with that.

With RPM bugs out of the way, there just isn't a viable reason for
wanting all the secondary-arch stuff installed by default.

I could see an argument for the "install everything" case -- you have
infinite disk space and you don't ever want to have to manually install
something for dependencies, and you want to use software which isn't
RPM-packaged. But "install everything which for the secondary arch which
happens to be installed for the primary" is just weird. 

-- 
dwmw2




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