Multi-Lib Question

[Christopher Stone]

On 8/12/06, Christopher Stone <chris.stone at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi this may be a little off-topic or a stupid question, but I recently
> tried to build a 32-bit application on Fedora's x86_64 arch.  I
> thought that all I needed to do was add -m32 to the CFLAGS and LDFLAGS
> to the makefile, but as it turns out the linking was problematic.  It
> turns out I did not have the 32-bit .so file needed for linking, so I
> attempted to install it with "yum install expat-devel.i386" but yum
> was unable to find the package.  Basically I needed to hard code a
> softlink in order to get the application to link.
>
> So the bottom line I guess is, how do I install a 32bit devel package
> on a Fedora x86_64 system?  And if 32bit libraries are provided as
> default for this system, why aren't their 32bit devel counterparts
> also provided?
>

After thinking about this a bit I realize the devel packages would
conflict with the header files.

It seems to me that the best solution to this problem is to create
noarch and arch specific devel packages.  So header files can go in
the noarch part and the .a and .so files can go in the arch specific
part.  The noarch package would depend on the arch specific one.

I guess this is probably too much to ask for however. :|