Yum $releasever $basearch

[Jonathan Berry]

On 5/24/05, John Austin <ja at jaa.org.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 13:34 +0100, Paul Howarth wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 13:18 +0100, Paul Howarth wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 13:15 +0100, John Austin wrote:
> > > > Hi,
> > > > Along the same lines:
> > > > Is it therefore impossible to force yum to use different
> > > > release and basearch without editing the .repro files ?
> > > >
> > > > Eg On an x86-64 FC install
> > > > Remove firefox-64 as the plugins aren't there and install firefox-i386
> > > > using yum (and hence jre-i386 with plugins)
> > > > Doing this by hand seems painful !!
> > > >
> > > > Is there a better way ?

It's really not that painful : ).  There are some things that you can
do to help ease the pain.  Keep reading.

> > > Not having an x86_64 box, I can't try this myself, but try putting:
> > >
> > > exclude=firefox.x86_64
> > >
> > > in your /etc/yum.conf
> >
> > This is to stop it getting reinstalled btw.; if you already have it
> > installed, you can remove it using:
> >
> > # yum remove firefox.x86_64
> >
> > A plain "yum install firefox" should then pick up the i386 version
> > because the x86_64 version is excluded. That's the theory anyway :-)
> >
> > Paul.

That would work if firefox.i386 was in the x86_64 tree, but it is not.
 That is, yum will only look in the x86_64 tree unless told to do so
otherwise.  The programs/libraries that get installed that are 32-bit
are actually in the x86_64 tree in addition to the i386 tree.  It
would be nice to have firefox.i386 put in the x86_64 tree for this
reason.

> Paul
> I confess I am not sure if what I am trying to do is sensible !!!!
> Two problems really
> 1. Installing to the "wrong" basearch (x86-64 versions not available)

This is no problem.  The big deal about AMD64 is that it runs i386 as
well as or better than 32-bit processors.  Go ahead and use that great
capability when you need to : ).  Note that you already have some i386
packages installed.  OpenOffice is the big one.

> 2. Installing to the "wrong" releasever (yum repo not available for the
> releasever yet)

This is probably a Bad Thing (tm).  More on that below.

> I have a Athlon64 machine with FCT3 x86-64 installed.
> Although my first email was wrt firefox and yum
> I have now installed firefox-i386 (tar) and
> jre-i386 (rpm-bin) by hand. Working OK
> (I have not tried your suggestion yet !!!!)

Why not just go to your favorite mirror, grab the firefox.i386 rpm and
install it by hand?  Or if you really want to, create a custom repo
file with the i386 repo that you want.  You are right that you cannot
use the normal mirror files; I just took the local (.us.east for me)
file, copied the contents, and edited all the lines to have the
correct arch.  CAUTION: you should have any i386 repos disabled by
default and enable them only when installing/updating the needed
32-bit programs (use the --enablerepo option).

> The general question is whether it is possible/sensible
> to try to use yum to install such things on test releases such as
> FC4T3 ??
> ie Use things like dag's FC3 i386 repo on a
> FC4T3 x86-64 built machine.
> 
> I can force i386 and 3 in the dag.repo say
> baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os

Okay, first you install a test release, and now you are wanting to use
FC3 packages with it? : )  It *may* work to install some FC3 packages
if things have not changed significantly.  But it is probably not safe
to have an FC3 repo on an FC4T3 machine.  Others may feel differently,
so feel free to comment.  This just seems to be asking for trouble. 
If you really want to use those packages, I suggest keeping the repo
disabled, like I said above.

> but not for mirrors as the $basearch variable does not appear
> it must be passed some other way as the $ARCH variable appears in the
> mirror list
> mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/fedora-core-
> $releasever
> 
> http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/3/$ARCH/os/

See my advice above.  You can have multiple baseurls.  Just list them
on separate lines, with the first only having the "baseurl=", if I'm
remembering correctly.

> Any advice gratefully received
> 
> John

Hope this helps.

Jonathan