Well as long as it's not something I've misconfigured I'm happy :) 
Thanks for your reply.

-Chris

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
> 
> Chris Tooley wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> It's me again with an annoying question.
>>
>> When I try to install subversion on a 64bit machine with dag and 
>> sl-security repos enabled I get these sorts of results:
>> ..............................................................................
>> [root@machine yum.repos.d]# uname -rm
>> 2.6.18-128.1.1.el5 x86_64
>> [root@machine yum.repos.d]# yum install subversion
>> Loaded plugins: kernel-module
>> sl-base 
>>              | 1.1 kB     00:00
>> primary.xml.gz 
>>              | 905 kB     00:00
>> sl-base                                                        3409/3409
>> dag 
>>              | 1.1 kB     00:00
>> primary.xml.gz 
>>              | 3.4 MB     00:01
>> dag                                                            9353/9353
>> sl-security 
>>              |  951 B     00:00
>> primary.xml.gz 
>>              | 234 kB     00:00
>> sl-security                                                    693/693
>> Excluding Packages in global exclude list
>> Finished
>> Setting up Install Process
>> Parsing package install arguments
>> Resolving Dependencies
>> --> Running transaction check
>> ---> Package subversion.x86_64 0:1.6.5-0.1.el5.rf set to be updated
>> ---> Package subversion.i386 0:1.4.2-4.el5_3.1 set to be updated
>> --> Finished Dependency Resolution
>> Beginning Kernel Module Plugin
>> Finished Kernel Module Plugin
>>
>> Dependencies Resolved
>>
>> ===========================================================================================================
>>   Package                 Arch                Version 
>>       Repository                Size
>> ===========================================================================================================
>> Installing:
>>   subversion              x86_64              1.6.5-0.1.el5.rf 
>>       dag                      6.8 M
>>   subversion              i386                1.4.2-4.el5_3.1 
>>       sl-security              2.3 M
>>
>> Transaction Summary
>> ===========================================================================================================
>> Install      2 Package(s)
>> Update       0 Package(s)
>> Remove       0 Package(s)
>>
>> Total download size: 9.1 M
>> Is this ok [y/N]: n
>> Exiting on user Command
>> Complete!
>> ..............................................................................
>>
>> Is there a reason why yum wants to install the i386 version of 
>> subversion on an x86_64 machine?  Have I misconfigured something somewhere?
>>
>> contents of sl-security.repo:
>> ..............................................................................
>> [sl-security]
>> name=SL 5 security updates
>> baseurl=http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/53/$basearch/updates/security
>>  
>> http://ftp1.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/53/$basearch/updates/security
>>  
>> ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/53/$basearch/updates/security
>> #mirrorlist=ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/mirrorlist/sl-security-53.txt
>> enabled=1
>> gpgcheck=0
>> # To use priorities you must have yum-priorities installed
>> priority=10
>> gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-sl 
>> file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-sl5 
>> file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-csieh 
>> file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-dawson 
>> file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-jpolok 
>> file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-cern 
>> file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5
>> ..............................................................................
>>
>> contents of dag.repo:
>> ..............................................................................
>> [dag]
>> name=DAG rpms
>> baseurl=http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/extra/dag/redhat/el5/en/$basearch/dag/
>>  
>> http://ftp1.scientificlinux.org/linux/extra/dag/redhat/el5/en/$basearch/dag/
>>  
>> ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/extra/dag/redhat/el5/en/$basearch/dag/
>> enabled=1
>> # To use priorities you must have yum-priorities installed
>> priority=30
>> ..............................................................................
>>
>> Please let me know if you need more information.  I can selectively 
>> install the x86_64 package by:
>> yum install subversion.x86_64
>> so it's OK in the end, but it seems kind of weird to me to install an 
>> i386 package in x86_64.
>>
>> The same thing happens with xdelta too, but the i386 package is from 
>> sl-base instead of sl-security.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> ~Chris
> 
>