Multi-Lib Question

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Sun, 2006-08-13 at 03:53 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> 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.

A multilib-ready package does not conflict in its header files.
It implements an arch-independent API.

> > 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).

Ralf