development packages and multilib

[Colin Walters]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 4:22 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 06:43:10PM -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
>> This is a dilemma we have in Fedora. I have no idea why someone would
>> want to keep the devel subpackages of the same package with different
>> archs installed.
>
> Because one wants to compile with 'gcc -m32'.  This is very useful
> when you have virtualization.
>
> Unfortunately the more I look at multilib, the more totally broken it
> seems to be.

multilib isn't broken, rather it has a limited scope.  It solves the
problems it was intended to well enough.  What we really need is an
explicit enumeration of the kinds of issues multilib is addressing,
and those that are outside the scope.

The things that are outside the scope include general software compilation.