Fighting the i386 plague

[Phil Knirsch]

Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 14:11:39 +0100,
>   Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski <D.Mierzejewski at icm.edu.pl> wrote:
>> If two packages own the same file then it's a bug in packaging!
> 
> If the shared file is the same in both packages, this can be a simpler
> solution than creating a whole other package just to contain the one shared
> file.
> 

So what you would be suggesting is to create new subpackages for any 
possible shared data?

First of all, this would lead to a huge package inflation, especially 
because of multilib packages. Also, this would have to be continually 
monitored for all packages in order to be useful and would be a real 
packaging nightmare as nearly any file from any package could be shared 
basically. This is definitely not doable for 2200+ packages in Fedora 
Core alone. Now add in the 4100+ Extras packages that will get reemerged 
and you're looking at more than 6300 packages where each package can 
share a file with another one and each change to each package filelist 
needs to be tracked and monitored and possibly a new subpackage created.

Second of all, i don't think thats the right solution anyway. As has 
previously been already stated, if 2 packages install the same file i 
see no reason why during removal it shouldn't be possible to check 
whether the same file is still "in use" by another package and then it's 
just not removed. So a useful and simple algorithm already exists, so 
why not use that.

I know file conflict/duplicate checks can be rather expensive 
computational wise, but even with the current form of the rpmdb it's 
possible to implement that rather efficiently.

Read ya, Phil

-- 
Philipp Knirsch      | Tel.:  +49-711-96437-470
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