Multilib Middle-Ground

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Callum Lerwick <seg at haxxed.com> said:
> WINE, which has legitimate open source purposes. Sorry, some of us pay
> our rent by developing open source that runs on Windows. I'm not going
> to live in my car for the sake of ideological purity.

Is there a bug that prevents "yum install wine" from pulling in the 32
bit libraries as needed?

Anything packaged properly in RPMs will get necessary dependencies
installed automatically when installed with yum (or the GUI).  The only
reason to include 32 bit libraries in a default install of a 64 bit
system is if there is a 32 bit binary in the default install.

After much encouragement, Adobe has RPMs in a repo for Flash and Acrobat
Reader.  Java is now in the distribution (as are replacements for flash
and acroread, although still less-functional at this time).  You can get
additional commonly-useful software from other third-party repos.  For
all of those, dependencies are handled automatically.

You cannot anticipate what dependencies _any_ non-RPM-packaged programs
may have (it doesn't really matter if the non-RPM software is open
source or proprietary); trying to pre-install possible dependencies is a
never-ending path to insanity.  If every random dependency has to be
pre-installed just in case, Fedora might as well just start requiring
Blu-Ray drives, as the "default" install won't fit on a DVD anymore.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.