yum pulling in 386 packages

[David Woodhouse]

On Sat, 2007-09-22 at 19:44 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-09-22 at 19:42 -0400, Michael Wiktowy wrote:
> > On 9/22/07, seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > >  If you want to avoid this behavior in the future add: exclude=*.?86 to
> > > your yum.conf.

That doesn't work when you want _some_ i386 packages which you specify
explicitly. Or on ppc64/sparc64 where you do want the 64-bit kernel but
all userspace can be 32-bit. It's just a fairly dodgy workaround.

> > Is this something that anaconda should add to all x86_64 installations
> > or is this just a workaround that might hide bugs and prevent Steve
> > from being the canary in the coal mine?
> 
> There isn't a bug here.Yum is doing exactly what it says to do. 

"it says to do"? I'm not quite sure of your meaning there -- I think
you're really saying "yum is doing exactly what yum does". Which is
true, but not really relevant.

I consider yum's behaviour buggy, as do many others. Arguing over
whether to call bug #235756 a bug or an RFE doesn't really buy us
anything. It's just bug #235756. All bug reports are really requests for
enhancement at some level, aren't they?

If I say 'yum install foo', I just want _one_ version of foo installed
-- the 32-bit PPC version that I actually intend to use.

I don't want a pointless 64-bit version installed, and I don't want an
i386 version installed for qemu to use under /usr/qemu-i386 either. If I
want those, I'll ask for them.

Neither do I want yum to search for ssh sessions where I am logged in as
root to other boxes, and install 'foo' there too.

Although 'install foo' is, when you think about it, a fairly vague
command and can be wilfully misinterpreted to mean any of the above, it
really _ought_ to be interpreted with a little bit of common sense. By
doing _any_ but the first of the operations above, yum would be
exceeding its mandate; doing something I didn't _really_ ask it to do.

It's supposed to be a useful piece of software, for $DEITY's sake -- not
a genie in a bottle trying to distort my wishes.

It would be really nice if we had a proper fix for this misbehaviour
before F8.

-- 
dwmw2