How are i386 packages selected for x86_64 repos?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:50:58 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 11:07:04 -0500,
>   Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> > I was thinking of trying the same thing with x86_64 but I don't think I want
> > to pull in all of the i386 packages and was wondering how the list of i386
> > packages was selected for normal x86_64 repos?
> 
> I thought about this issue for a bit and I think the answer is to include
> all i386, i686 packages that provide something that is not provided by
> any x86_64 package. Previously I was looking for some way to flag i386
> specific stuff, but that was thinking too narrowly.
> I am not sure of the best way to do the above, but I think I will be able to
> get something to work. I'll also need to be a little careful of version
> differences as my i386 and x86_64 rpms may have a couple of packages out
> of sync because of checking koji at different times. That should be a solveable
> problem as well.

You can take a look at the current tool that fills the biarch repos.
It's "mash", written in Python, and in the Fedora repo. The basic
pkg selection scheme is to add all -devel pkgs and their dependencies,
plus packages from a whitelist and minus packages from a blacklist.