multilib fun - devel packages

[Matthias Saou]

Bill Nottingham wrote :

> One of the things we've been looking at is improving support for
> multilib/multiarch environments. The next big step is handling
> devel packages so they can be installed in a multilib fashion.
> 
> However, many devel packages have conflicts in their header
> and similar files.

Let me ask a silly question here : Why do we want to encourage people to
build 32bit stuff on 64bit installs? As far as I'm concerned, we should
already be trying to fix everything that made some 32bit packages get into
64bit installs (unfortunately, things like binary web browser plugins
aren't helping).

IMHO, there is too much workload and complexity created by any of the
suggestions made. Just setarch and use mach or moch. Trying to get
multiarch devel packages is probably going to be close to
cross-compiling... ugly hacks, hard-to-manage-long Fedora specific patches
upstream authors won't want to include, etc.

Just my opinion, then again, I've never liked the whole multilib concept,
and seeing it about to get worse gets me wondering some more.

Matthias

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