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

[seth vidal]

On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 09:53 -0700, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> 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.

welcome. glad it's working correctly for you.



> 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 sounds more like a problem to be solved by packaging than by the
pkg mgmt tool. And --excludepath is kinda horky in general.

Take up this issue with the package maintainer(s) and see what they say.
Specifically bring this up on fedora-devel as a 'what should be done
here' question. I'd like to hear what the opinions all around are.

thanks,

-sv