[Yum] Success with yum-20040416, and a request

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

Hi, Seth -

I wanted you to know that I've finally had a chance to test the
multiarch capabilities of the 20040416 snapshot on some AMD64 boxes
running FC1.  As far as I can tell, everything works well, and it's a
huge relief not to have to handle 32-bit and 64-bit RPMs differently. 
Thanks for doing the work.

The one problem that is left is not with yum itself, but it could be
worked around usefully by adding a new feature to yum.  Several of the
32-bit packages in FC1 will not install cleanly on a 64-bit system,
sometimes with fatal consequences.

For example, if I try to install the 32-bit e2fsprogs, rpmlib detects no
conflicts, but it chooses to overwrite the 64-bit e2fsprogs binaries in
/sbin.  The result is that small things like e2fsck suddenly fail to
work, which is a bit of a calamity.

Other packages have silly problems such as docs not being tagged with
%doc, so false conflicts show up unnecessarily.  This means that yum
can't install those packages.

The way I work around these problems at the moment is by installing the
offending RPMs with rpm itself using the --excludepath option, like
this:

rpm -iv --excludepath /sbin /long/path/to/e2fsprogs-[0-9]*.i386.rpm

This works by forcing rpm to ignore the offending path, and eliminates
both false conflicts and the possibility of overwriting binaries that it
shouldn't.

So the request I have is this: if you could plumb in support for
--excludepath, that would be most excellent.  I'll file a bug as a
reminder.

Thanks again for the multiarch work you've done so far.  Yum is already
enormously better on AMD64 systems than it was a few months ago!

	<b