stupid question for help: why two FC4 packages have same files without confliction??

[Jonathan Berry]

On 2/21/06, Robinson Tiemuqinke <hahaha_30k at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  I'm playing with FC4 toy now and have a stupid
> question: normally any two different packages can not
> share a regular file otherwise there will be a
> confliction, but why these two packages
> xorg-x11-libs.x86_64 and xorg-x11-libs.i386 can have
> same files?
>
>  Thanks a lot.
>
> [root at basement01 ~]# rpm -ql -v xorg-x11-libs.x86_64 |
> grep zh_TW.big5
> drwxr-xr-x    2 root    root                0 Sep 21
> 16:18 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_TW.big5
> -r--r--r--    1 root    root              384 Sep 21
> 16:18 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_TW.big5/Compose
> -r--r--r--    1 root    root              344 Sep 21
> 16:18 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_TW.big5/XI18N_OBJS
> -r--r--r--    1 root    root             9611 Sep 21
> 16:18 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_TW.big5/XLC_LOCALE
> [root at basement01 ~]# rpm -ql -v xorg-x11-libs.i386 |
> grep zh_TW.big5
> drwxr-xr-x    2 root    root                0 Sep 21
> 16:18 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_TW.big5
> -r--r--r--    1 root    root              384 Sep 21
> 16:17 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_TW.big5/Compose
> -r--r--r--    1 root    root              344 Sep 21
> 16:18 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_TW.big5/XI18N_OBJS
> -r--r--r--    1 root    root             9611 Sep 21
> 16:17 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_TW.big5/XLC_LOCALE
> [root at basement01 ~]# rpm - xorg-x11-libs.i386 | grep
> zh_TW.big5
> [root at basement01 ~]# file
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_TW.big5/Compose
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_TW.big5/Compose: ASCII
> English text
> [root at basement01 ~]# uname -a
> Linux basement01.alexa.com 2.6.13-1.1532_FC4 #1 Thu
> Oct 20 01:28:35 EDT 2005 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64
> GNU/Linux

Probably just an idiosyncrasy of a dual-arch system like x86_64.
RPM doesn't seem to be confused:
$ rpm -q --whatprovides /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_TW.big5
xorg-x11-libs-6.8.2-37.FC4.49.2.x86_64
xorg-x11-libs-6.8.2-37.FC4.49.2.i386

Both packages seem to share the file.  With x86_64, you can have both
i386 and x86_64 packages installed for certain packages (eg libraries,
like your example).  This is normal and is usually not a problem. 
There was a fiasco a while back with the 32-bit perl package being
installed accidentally, which caused problems on update when it was
removed.  Basically, expect to see a lot of dual package sets like the
above.  I don't know how many share files, though.  That was a new one
on me : ).

Jonathan