[Yum] multilib system installation

[Piotr Romanus]

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.

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.

Any help greatly appreciated,

Piotr
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