Multilib Middle-Ground

[David Mansfield]

On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 09:22 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Andrew Farris <lordmorgul <at> gmail.com> writes:
> > Gross exaggeration... 'default install image' doesn't have to mean Live CDs. 
> > Also are you actually suggesting that it would be best for those proprietary 
> > applications to ship their own libraries because Fedora makes it difficult to 
> > get their applications to work on x86_64 boxes due to the company being
> > forced to figure out what i386 rpms they have to explicitly require on those 
> > machines... in Fedora... and not in other rpm based distros?  You've got to
> > be kidding.
> 
> They're not forced to explicitly require anything, just not explicitly turn off 
> the RPM feature which AUTOMATICALLY adds those Requires, in a way which:
> * is only fulfilled by the correct architecture package of the dependency, 
> because RPM uses libfoo.so.1 for 32-bit and libfoo.so.1()(64bit) for 64-bit 
> dependencies,
> * works fully across (RPM-based) distributions, because it doesn't require a 
> particular package name, but an soname. And the application won't run anyway if 
> you don't have a library with that soname (which is the whole reason why 
> compat-libstdc++ is needed), so if one distro has libfoo.so.1 and another has 
> libfoo.so.2, omitting the automatic dependencies won't solve the problem, it 
> will just make the application error at runtime rather than at install-time 
> (which sucks, why wait until runtime to report a problem which can be detected 
> during installation?).

Not that I'm justifying it or anything, but I've definitely installed
3rd party software that had a fancy installer (veritas and oracle both,
I believe) which did it's own checking of required packages, and even
allowed you to install any missing dependencies using some gui interface
built into the installer.

In other words, the dependencies ARE getting checked, but not by RPM,
because that would prevent you from installing the installer. 

Now, if the installer was as separate rpm...

David