Troy Dawson wrote:
> Hi Chris,
> This is a feature of yum in RHEL5 and SL5.
> I just double checked to see if this was fixed with 5.4. Nope.
> Why does it do that?
> Because at some point yum and/or RedHat decided that would be the thing
> to do so developers would quit whining about not having their 32 bit
> libraries.
> (Don't roll your eyes too much. There are plenty of developers/users
> here  on the scientific-linux-users list that have complained because
> their favorite 32 bit library wasn't installed by default on a 64 bit
> machine)
> I have checked Fedora 11, and it only installs the arch that you are
> running, and it is almost the same version of yum that is in RHEL 5.4,
> so I'm thinking it is a feature put in by RedHat.
> 
> Could I track down and change yum so that it doesn't do this?  Yes.
> Am I going to do it?  No.
> Why?  Because that would change the functionality of yum on SL5.  This
> could unexpected results.  The one expected result that I don't want is
> that when someone does an x86_64 install, they would get different
> packages after the change than before the change.
> 
> How to really fix it?
> First complain upstream to RedHat.  I do know that this was brought up
> to RedHat at the Summit when discussing RHEL 6.  If this feature makes
> it into the main RHEL, it will make it into SL.
> If it is possible for there to be an easy fix so that we could make a
> SL_ rpm, that would be good.  But I personally will not dig through yum
> to find that fix, I just have too much other stuff to do.  But if
> someone has an easy fix, I wouldn't mind wrapping it into an SL_ rpm.
> 
> Thanks
> Troy

I had the exact same problem a few days ago, and used the same
workaround as Chris. I understand SL not deviating from upstream but I
still don't understand upstream's reasoning. If I install
subversion.x86_64 I have a working subversion, including all the libs.
If a developer decides he wants the 32-bit libs then I could just do yum
install subversion.i386, why does it need to install 32-bit by default?

And do you know, will this change be rolled out to other packages so
that whenever we install something in future it will install both 32-
and 64-bit versions of it?

Regards

Tim Edwards