Hi Troy,

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Troy Dawson wrote:

> Stephan Wiesand wrote:
> > Dear All,
> >
> > I noticed that the 3.0.3 release comes with a number of 32bit packages
> > a la Red Hat.
> >
> > After having found out how to deal with them with RPM and YUM by appending
> > .arch to the package name on the command line (is this documented
> > anywhere? I learned about it in some mailing list only...), this is still
> > ugly but usable.
> >
> > Is this the way forward now regarding 32bit compatibility?
> >
> > Cheers,
> >         Stephan
> >
>
> It is a step in the way forward.  It definatly is much better than not having
> the i386 rpm's in the x86_64.

I agree. I'm just afraid the colleagues from CERN won't like it because
apt can't handle this yet. But then, rumours say that it's being worked
on.

> I haven't had to install i386 rpm's where there was a x86_64 bit rpm as well,
> so I haven't had to do the trick you are talking about.
>
> I do know that yum will get the appropriate i386 library or support file if
> the package you are getting needs it.  Such as if you are installing openoffice.
>
> Since I haven't had to install anything specifically ... what is the yum
> syntax to install a i386 rpm instead of it's x86_64 counterpart?

If it's in the repository, use something like
"yum install krb5-libs.i386". This also works for "yum remove".

I had good succes with installing additional packages not in the release
by linking them to some extra repository, doing a yum arch -l, and adding
that to /etc/yum.conf. For some reason, it won't allow me to simply add
the whole i386 distribution.

The nasty part is that if you have the x86_64 package installed, and then
install and remove the i386 package, all files shared between them are gone.

There are also some bugs left in both yum and rpm. For example, "rpm -q
krb5-libs.i386" will return 0 even if only the x86_64 package is
installed. And yum refuses to install kernel-unsupported.ia32e on my shiny
new EM64T test system because it insists that x86_64 is the one and only
architecture I should install for.

But I expect all this to work eventually. And since I looked into RHEL4
beta 1, and they're doing it just the same way there, it's probably the
way to go, ugly or not.

Cheers,
        Stephan
>
> Troy
>
>

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