[Yum] multilib system installation

[Seth Vidal]

On Thu, 25 Jun 2009, Piotr Romanus wrote:

> I am working on an embedded system with several cards (blade sever). The system is based on RH distribution. It consists
> of a card that is the "controller" of the entire system and other cards that boot through tftp/nfs from the "controller"
> card. The controller card hosts diskless partitions for all the other cards.
> 
> I am in the process of replacing old proprietary code that was used to create/upgrade these diskless partitions with yum.
> The controller cards is running stripped down version of 64-bit EL5. The cards are also based on 64-bit EL5.
> 
> I need to create a multilib (64-bit executables and libraries + 32-bit libraries) version of the diskless partition. To
> do that I created a meta rpm spec file containing all the dependant packages that I need to install on the non-controller
> cards. So the meta package spec file contains a large list of "requires" statements - one for each dependant package that
> I want to install (probably overkill). I built this package twice - once on 32-bit system and once on 64-bit system so I
> ended up with two rpm packages - foo.i386.rpm and foo.x86_64.rpm.
> 
> Next I created a local repository on the controller cards with all required/dependent packages - both x86_64 version and
> i386 versions. The repository also contains foo.i386.rpm and foo.x86_64.rpm.
> 
> To create a diskless partition I executed the following command:
> 
> yum -y --enablerepo my_repo --installroot=/tftpboot/diskless_part/ install foo
> 
> After reading YUM FAQ #9 I expected that YUM would install i386 and x86_version of foo - which it did - and i386 and
> x86_64 version of every dependent package - which it DID NOT. None of the i386 dependant packages was intalled.


Were there any broken deps when it was finished? If so that's the 
problem. If not then I'm not sure I see what's wrong with that.

> I wonder if my expectation was wrong and if it was why? Is there any other way to install 32-bit libraries onto the
> diskless partition I had created? Currently /lib does not contain any libraries.
> 
> I am running yum 3.2.8.

I'd recommend updating to at least the yum version from rhel 5.3 or even 
the latest from here:

http://people.redhat.com/jantill/yum-test-5.4/

-sv