Fighting the i386 plague

[Peter Robinson]

> > 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…

There were disagreements with the previous RPM maintainer. There's now
a revived rpm project to fix these issues and get out new releases
rather than the highly patched versions that a lot of distros have.
See this post for further details
https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/rpm-announce/2006-December/000000.html
and I think it was sent to various fedora lists too.

Peter