[Yum] FC 6 x86_64

[Robert G. Brown]

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.

    rgb

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu