yum pulling in 386 packages

[Richi Plana]

On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 16:20 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 09:54 -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
> > Why keep the i386 versions in the repo?  It would be better to write
> > down the rules that are used to pull i386 packages into the x86_64
> > repo and then make a yum plugin that can point to the i386 repo and
> > follow the rules (when enabled).
> 
> There's a lot of sense in this. One of the options being discussed is to
> ship _nothing_ of the secondary arch (or almost nothing) in the primary
> repository, and allow yum to be pointed at the basic i386 repo.

One problem with this is that many arch-specific packages contain 1)
arch-neutral resources in them (like documentation, data files and
arch-neutral scripts) and 2) some binaries in /usr/bin that collide with
each other. Ideally, a solution like that would allow installing of
packages from any arbitrary architecture (say, ppc and i386) without
there every being any collisions. Unfortunately, neither the
alternatives system nor FHS supports multi-arch installs.

Even the current i386-x86_64 installs aren't perfect. The library
separation and linking works alright, but the executable programs
in /usr/bin don't (e.g. /usr/bin/soundstretch installed in both
soundtouch.x86_64 and soundtouch.i386 is x86_64 only).

Does anyone see /usr/(bin|lib).(i386|i686|x86_64|ppc|ppc64) in the
future? :-)
--

Richi Plana