[Yum] Re: [Dulug] FC 6 x86_64

[seth vidal]

On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 21:17 -0500, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> A question.  I'm trying to set up FC 6 repos at home for both i386 and
> x86_64, since I have about equal numbers of both architectures.  I've
> got dhcp/pxe/kickstart working nicely with a mirror of
> install.dulug.duke.edu and have successfully installed and updated one
> host (i386) with the manual interface.
> 
> I'm now working on kickstart with an x86_64 box, since it happens to be
> one I can reinstall a dozen times and nobody cares -- no windows on it
> at all, no important data.  I've gotten it to kickstart install quite
> perfectly and am working on the %post configuration and yum update that
> follows.
> 
> What I'm currently trying to understand is that
> 
>    /pub/dulug/base/fc-6/x86_64/Fedora/RPMS/
> 
> on install (or the equivalent on mirror) are architecture twinned --
> they contain two copies of maybe 1/3 of the packages, one x86_64
> ("right") and one iX86 ("wrong").  Where X isn't even "only" equal to 3
> -- sometimes it is 6.  This was actually true in fc 4 as well (and
> probably others).  Does anybody know why?  It seems to waste a lot of
> space and caused at least one unexpected collision in a kickstart
> install.
> 
> Fortunately the packages usually have the same revision number, so I
> think that I'm usually getting the right architecture, but post install
> I somehow ended up with BOTH i686 and x86_64 packages for frysk
> installed by kickstart (way beyond my control, in other words) and had
> to kick on the engine block a bit to get a yum update to go through.
> 
> Is this normal and good?  Why aren't all the packages in the x86_64
> directory x86_64 packages?  Or rather, I could see maybe putting in a
> few i386 packages where one can't get the correct architecture to build
> or something like that, but I'm having a hard time seeing why one would
> ever want both of them, side by side.

short version: 
 - those are the multilib compatibility libs so you can run/build/etc
i386 binaries on your x86_64 system.

They are supposed to be there but only for some of the packages. If you
see conflicts installing them then that's a bug or some other conflict,
check fedora's bugzilla - see if it is mentioned there, first.

-sv