FC5T2 and Development issues, observations, and questions

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 1/17/06, Nathan Grennan <fedora-test-list at cygnusx-1.org> wrote:
> I agree that this could be fixed by better packaging, or even better
> mozilla. I don't see why mozilla is being blocked in this case. From
> what I see, having just looked into it, is that /usr/bin/mozilla is a
> script, and it uses paths that mention /usr/lib. The way I would expect
> this to be handled would be that the mozilla.x86_64 package would
> override the mozilla.i386's version of the script, and all should be
> good.

"overrides" are not understood by how rpm handles multilib.
Package foo.i386 and package foo.x86_64 both provide a file
/usr/bin/foo-madness.sh
if both the .386 and the x86_64 version of the file are the same then
the i386 and x86_64 packages are allow to co-exist. If the 2 versions
of that file differ, then a conflict is raised.

"overrides" imply an assumed preference and there is no way for rpm to
know that you prefer one version of the file over the other. Which
version of the file is what you intended to have on your system is
situational as intepreted by the local admin.

> Maybe a better way would to rewrite the script to be conditional,
> and realize if it was on a x86_64 system or not.

Yes the only way forward with this script is to make sure that the
i386 version and the x86_64 version of the script are exactly the
same. The same must also be true of the shared manpage.  These are
filable issues to take up with the fedora core mozilla maintainer.

-jef