[Yum] yum arch handling

[Mark Salter]

On Thu, 2008-10-23 at 12:14 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-10-23 at 12:04 -0400, Mark Salter wrote:
> > So, I'm toying around with the idea of using yum to install non-hostarch
> > packages into some installroot. For instance, I have a repo containing
> > some noarch and arm rpms. On an x86 box, given a yum.conf which only
> > points to that noarch+arm repo, I'd like to be able to do something
> > like:
> > 
> >   % yum -c my_yum.conf  depsolve 'somepkg'
> > 
> > The problem is that yum doesn't seem to want anything to do with arches
> > which don't make sense for the x86 host. Not even 'list' them. If I run
> > the yum list command, only the noarch rpms are shown.
> > 
> > Am I missing something? Am I crazy for even thinking about such a thing?
> 
> If the arch cannot use the pkgs then yum ignores them.
> 
> If you can 'setarch' to that arch then yum will work - but I doubt you
> can do that with i686->arm.
> 
> The trouble is, of course, that scriptlets can't be run. So installing
> the pkgs just won't work.
> 
> does this help?
> 

Yes. I know about the scripts and have some thoughts on how to handle
that part. At the moment, I'm just using noscripts in tsflags and am
focused on getting the depsolving part working.

And no, setarch as-is can't help.

So, where to go from here? Would a commandline arg to yum specifying
the desired arch/arches be interesting for the community? Or should I
be thinking along the lines of a new tool (reusing as much of the yum
backend as possible)?

--Mark