development packages and multilib

[Orcan Ogetbil]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Callum Lerwick writes:
>> On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 03:07 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>>> Of course this breaks horribly if the binary is something like kde4-config
>>> (you'll want kde4-config --libsuffix and the like to return different
>>> results for 32-bit or 64-bit builds), and we don't have a good solution for
>>> that. (Yes, kde4-config is an ELF binary, not a script.)
>
>> Because KDE always has to be different and inevitably manages to Do It
>> Wrong.
>
> So, I suppose you can tell me how to do it better?  mysql-config and
> similar programs have the same issue, so I'm awaiting your wisdom
> with bated breath.
>
> Actually the only reason that mysql-config is a binary and not a script
> is that there doesn't seem to be any other good way for it to know which
> word-width it's supposed to return results for.  This is one of the main
> problems with trying to do software builds in a multilib environment.
>
>                        regards, tom lane
>

What is wrong with renaming the xxxxx-config binary to
xxxxx-config.%{arch} (or moving it to %{_libdir}) and writing a
platform independent shell script xxxxx-config that will call the
correct xxxxx-config.%{arch} file?

Orcan