Multi-Lib Question

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 12 Aug 2006 17:27:26 -0700, Christopher Stone 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.

That doesn't make much sense, since files with the same checksum don't
conflict and can be in multiple packages. The conflicts would be in
the arch-specific files (e.g. arch-specific header contents).