Re: Multilib Middle-Ground

[Kevin Kofler <kevin kofler chello at>]

Andrew Farris <lordmorgul <at> gmail.com> writes:
> Gross exaggeration... 'default install image' doesn't have to mean Live CDs. 
> Also are you actually suggesting that it would be best for those proprietary 
> applications to ship their own libraries because Fedora makes it difficult to 
> get their applications to work on x86_64 boxes due to the company being
> forced to figure out what i386 rpms they have to explicitly require on those 
> machines... in Fedora... and not in other rpm based distros?  You've got to
> be kidding.

They're not forced to explicitly require anything, just not explicitly turn off 
the RPM feature which AUTOMATICALLY adds those Requires, in a way which:
* is only fulfilled by the correct architecture package of the dependency, 
because RPM uses libfoo.so.1 for 32-bit and libfoo.so.1()(64bit) for 64-bit 
dependencies,
* works fully across (RPM-based) distributions, because it doesn't require a 
particular package name, but an soname. And the application won't run anyway if 
you don't have a library with that soname (which is the whole reason why 
compat-libstdc++ is needed), so if one distro has libfoo.so.1 and another has 
libfoo.so.2, omitting the automatic dependencies won't solve the problem, it 
will just make the application error at runtime rather than at install-time 
(which sucks, why wait until runtime to report a problem which can be detected 
during installation?).

        Kevin Kofler