On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Jaroslaw Polok wrote:

> > >
> > > 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.
>
> Colleagues at CERN ;-) also added these for Scientific Linux CERN 3.0.3
> (release candidate just out today):
>
> The initial system installation will handle above without any problem
> (of course ;-)): it is true that currently apt cannot do multi-arch
> updates but:
>
>    - x86_64/ia64 are not our production environments right now (and
>      still for some time to come)
>
>    - apt can be easily extended via LUA scripts (so if there's an
>      upgrade on 32 bit packages on 64bit system we can hook-up a
>      workaround script using rpm directly - for example)
>
>    - we can provide one-time off scripts to do 32bit upgrades/installs
>      using rpm ...
>
> (yes ... most of above is not too 'nice' .. but better than nothing)
>
>    - indeed apt people (;-)) are working on multi-arch (.. not very
>      fast though ...)
>
> >
> > 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.
> >
>
> .. yep .. (I've also seen inconsistent overwrites of binaries depending
> on the order of 32/64 bit install/remove/update operations ...)
>
> > 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.
>
> (isn't it because your yum.conf contains exactarch=1 ?)

I think there is a patch to yum that will make this work.  I found out
about it after the release went out.

-Connie Sieh
>
> > 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.
>
> It looks like ... personally I would prefer much more SuSE/Debian
> packaging: 32bit packages are recognized by name alike:
> XXXX-32bit-VVV.RRR
> (this needs of course extra package building ... versus copying from
> i386 build)
>
> .. but I guess we have to live with Red Hat way ...
>
> Jarek ([log in to unmask])
>
> --
> general signature fault ...
>