[Yum] Yum exactarch flag not working right

[seth vidal]

On Wed, 2004-11-17 at 14:53 -0700, Mark Lane wrote:
> I noticed a problem installing thunderbird onto my system today using yum 
> install. It wanted to install both the i386 and x86_64 packages instead of 
> just the x86_64 package. That makes no sense whatsoever.


Invert it. yum remove thunderbird

wouldn't you expect it to remove both?

yum install tries to be intelligent:
 - it installs the highest version available
 - it installs the best arch w/i the biarch list available

 and it does these things only if you do not use any greater
specification.

For example:

 yum install samba.i386
 yum install samba.x86_64
 yum install yum.noarch
 yum install yum-2.1.10-1

see the trend?

Now think about the issue of globbing.

What should it do?
yum install samba*



> I have exactarch=0 so I can install i386 packages if I wish but if I don't 
> specific the arch it should install the x86_64 package because my system is 
> x86_64. It definitely shouldn't be installing both.

exactarch doesn't affect installs, only updates.


> My recommendation is to deprecate exactarch and to have yum work the following 
> way.


> 
> 1) if you update packages that in installs the same arch(es) as is already 
> installed.

except for all the cases where that breaks b/c a package legitimately
changes arch: i386->noarch?

> 2)  If I install a package it should install just the basearch package unless 
> told otherwise by the .arch extension. An additional extension (.all) can be 
> used to may yum install all available arches.

This might be reasonable but how well does that replicate to update and
remove, for consistency?

'yum remove foo' only removes foo.$basearch?

That sounds a bit odd to me.

-sv