Fighting the i386 plague

[Sam Varshavchik]

Gregory Maxwell writes:

> Not needed packages.. files..
> 
> Right now foo.x86_64.rpm and foo.i386.rpm can provide
> /usr/share/foo/important_arch_neutral_file_such_as_a_manpage
> 
> If you remove foo.i386.rpm the shared file will get nuked.
> 
> RPM can recognize such overlaps and do the right thing, but some code
> which greatly speeds up dependency computation breaks that.

No, this is the other way around.  rpm is broken.  If both package X and 
package Y install the same file, removing package X _SHOULD NOT_ remove the 
shared file.

And that's the way it works for everything except, inexplicably, %doc files 
that go into /usr/share/doc, and locale files in /usr/share/locale.  This is 
a known bug that's apparently been in rpm for years.  It's supposedly fixed 
in the "upstream" release of rpm, and who knows when that's going to go into 
Fedora.  rpm development has stagnated.  Rather than bite the bullet and fix 
some of the overgrown bloat and legacy cruft in rpm, the current solution 
seems to be to just affix one bandaid after another, i.e. the kludge with 
installing the kernel rpms correctly, the external kmdl rpms, etc…

I have no idea why rpm runs different logic for %doc files and locale files. 
That's a brain-scratcher.


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