Multilib Middle-Ground

Warren Togami wtogami at redhat.com
Wed Apr 30 16:33:57 UTC 2008


Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Warren Togami (wtogami at redhat.com) said: 
>> * In the case of this scim change: You do a Korean language install.
>> Even on a non-LiveCD install you end up missing i386 (and font) packages
>> necessary for full Korean desktop support.  There is no obvious way for
>> the user to know why it broke.  It is suddenly impossible to have a full
>> Korean language desktop install by using the yum group.  THIS IS A BIG
>> PROBLEM OUTSIDE OF LIVECD.
> 
> ... 'and font'? The scim change changes fonts? O RLY?
> 
> This is *exactly* what I said. You're saying we should do something
> special for an input method (for GTK only) that we don't do for 
> QT input methods, NSS modules, PAM modules, etc.

Then I guess we are really not that much worse off.  It is impossible 
for yum groupinstall to "fix" these problems in Fedora 9.

This points to a more general problem: We were not happy with having a 
huge pile of unnecessary i386 packages so our solution was to completely 
eliminate them from the default install.  We went TOO FAR 
overcompensating for the previous broken multilib behavior.

Dependencies or a comps multilib whitelist could be a nice 
middle-ground.  Some users want to be i386-free.  Other users want a 
tiny set of expected packages to be multilib to avoid confusion.  The 
current yum option is either all or none.

Perhaps we need a third option like "smart" which uses a multilib 
whitelist that can be updated via repodata.  Anaconda and other GUI 
interfaces can allow the user to choose between "smart" and "100% i386 
free".  This way "yum groupinstall korean-support" can install 
everything the user expects.

This avoids the lose of:
- expecting the user to manually install a complicated set of 
arch-specific packages because they can't use yum groupinstall
- expecting the user to change the yum multilib priority option and 
subject themselves to a huge pile of unnecessary crap that they will 
never need.

No time to do this before F9.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com




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