More and more yum dependency problems

[Jonathan Berry]

On 8/4/05, Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-08-03 at 21:00 -0500, Jonathan Berry wrote:
[snip]
> > different, I don't remember, I think it was back in FC2.  Some
> > experimentation has shown that I was (with some trouble) able to
> > install the 32-bit version without explicitly removing the 64-bit
> > version.  So perhaps you are right.  However, installing the 32-bit
> > version (with yum) seems to have removed the 64-bit version!  How did
> > that happen, I wonder?
> 
> I'd have thought "yum install firefox.i386" would work. I can't try
> myself because I don't have an AMD64 system.

It would, except that, like Mozilla, firefox.i386 is not in the x86_64
tree.  Neither are some of the needed 32-bit libraries, apparently. 
The packages that are in the x86_64 tree are trivial to install.  So
what I have done is setup some .repo files (disabled by default) with
the 32-bit paths hard-coded called base-i386 and
updates-released-i386.  So the yum line ends up being

yum --enablerepo=base-i386 --enablerepo=updates-released-i386 install
firefox.i386

This is why I do not understand how the OP got mozilla.i386 installed
without his knowledge.  Or how another person had gnome-panel.i386
installed.

> >   This is getting stranger all the time.  Still,
> > even if I was able to install both versions at the same time, though,
> > there would be no easy way to run the 32-bit version because it would
> > be masked by the 64-bit version.  I'd argue that this could be a bad
> > policy, unless the packages are made to work that way.
> 
> I agree it's not very useful for non-library packages.

I could imagine a few cases where you might want the 32-bit packages
(need 32-bit plugins, developer who needs 32-bit versions for testing,
etc), and in those cases it might be nice to have both installed.

Jonathan