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