More and more yum dependency problems

[Paul Howarth]

On Wed, 2005-08-03 at 21:00 -0500, Jonathan Berry wrote:
> On 8/3/05, Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org> wrote:
> > My understanding of the way Fedora multilib support works is that rpm
> > will allow you to simultaneously install .i386 and .x86_64 versions of
> > exactly the same package and it won't complain about file conflicts - it
> > just ignores the .i386 versions of conflicting files. This is how it was
> > possible for .i386 and .x86_64 versions of perl to coexist in FC3. If
> > you then try to update one but not the other, it breaks because the
> > epoch/version/release numbers aren't the same and the file conflicts are
> > no longer ignored.
> > 
> > The OP's file conflicts were:
> >    file /usr/bin/mozilla from install of
> > mozilla-1.7.10-1.5.1 conflicts with file from package mozilla-1.7.8-2
> >   file /usr/share/man/man1/mozilla.1.gz from install of
> > mozilla-1.7.10-1.5.1 conflicts with file from package mozilla-1.7.8-2
> > 
> > Different versions/releases, so that's why there was a conflict.
> 
> Hmm, interesting idea, do you know of anything that might say for
> sure?  I didn't think this was true, but I could be wrong.  It would
> explain some of the things that have apparently happened (instances of
> Perl, mozilla, and gnome-panel being installed in both archs).  It
> seems the last time I tried to install 32-bit Firefox, though, I had
> to first uninstall the 64-bit version.  Maybe the versions were
> different, I don't remember, I think it was back in FC2.  Some
> experimentation has shown that I was (with some trouble) able to
> install the 32-bit version without explicitly removing the 64-bit
> version.  So perhaps you are right.  However, installing the 32-bit
> version (with yum) seems to have removed the 64-bit version!  How did
> that happen, I wonder?

I'd have thought "yum install firefox.i386" would work. I can't try
myself because I don't have an AMD64 system.

>   This is getting stranger all the time.  Still,
> even if I was able to install both versions at the same time, though,
> there would be no easy way to run the 32-bit version because it would
> be masked by the 64-bit version.  I'd argue that this could be a bad
> policy, unless the packages are made to work that way.

I agree it's not very useful for non-library packages.

After a quick google session, the best reference I can find on this is:
http://www.linuxtx.org/amd64faq.html

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>