Multilib Middle-Ground

[Les Mikesell]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Colin Walters <walters at verbum.org> wrote:
>>  The right way to approach this I think is to target specific third
>>  party applications which we want to work out of the box.  Say for
>>  example, Flash and VMWare Workstation.  Surely there are others, but I
>>  think we can arrive at a reasonably sane set.  We then add these
>>  packages to the default install image.
> 
> Would you include the following in your "sane" set?
> 
> IDL
> MatLab
> LabView
> Mathematica
> SAS/IML and SAS/STAT
> nag.com library products
> any number of proprietary fortran and C compilers

Throw in Sun's 32 bit jvm's too.

Would it be possible to grow rpm meta-packages of 32-bit lib 
dependencies for common applications as they become known with some 
consistent name convention so something like
yum install vmware_32bit_libs
would fix things instead of having to know each needed file and which 
package provides it?

Also, what's going to happen in an upgrade of a machine with existing 32 
bit apps?  Will the older libs stay?  Will they work?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com