[Yum-devel] basearchonly plugin

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wed, 2007-07-25 at 18:34 +0200, Florian Festi wrote:
> Yes, multilib (not necessarily restricted to yum) works "as intended". It is 
> alway a bit fishy to conclude from the result to the intention but I always 
> have the feeling that the intention was to incorporate multilib with as few 
> changes as ever possible and to hope it would be obsolete before anyone 
> complains too much. While the first was done very successfully the second 
> still doesn't seam to work that well.

FWIW, this is very much not the case.  Yes, the hope was that multilib
would not require substantial changes on the parts of packagers.  But it
was done with the knowledge that it was likely going to live for a very
long time.  

That said, the scope of what's provided as multilib has increased over
time.  This has been pretty much directly as a result of requests from
actual users.  Originally, the only things offered were basically what
is guaranteed by the LSB.  But the reality is that doesn't really let
much run :-)   And so we began to flesh out the library list (by hand)
to try to include most of the packages with libraries that were shipped.
This helped with a lot of things, but maintaining the list by hand was
not fun and not at all scalable.  Also, people wanted to be able to do
multilib development.  Which led to where we are today with the
existence of a -devel package being the key for "this should be
multilib; resolve its deps too"

Jeremy