On Wed, 2004-11-17 at 14:53 -0700, Mark Lane wrote: > I noticed a problem installing thunderbird onto my system today using yum > install. It wanted to install both the i386 and x86_64 packages instead of > just the x86_64 package. That makes no sense whatsoever. Invert it. yum remove thunderbird wouldn't you expect it to remove both? yum install tries to be intelligent: - it installs the highest version available - it installs the best arch w/i the biarch list available and it does these things only if you do not use any greater specification. For example: yum install samba.i386 yum install samba.x86_64 yum install yum.noarch yum install yum-2.1.10-1 see the trend? Now think about the issue of globbing. What should it do? yum install samba* > I have exactarch=0 so I can install i386 packages if I wish but if I don't > specific the arch it should install the x86_64 package because my system is > x86_64. It definitely shouldn't be installing both. exactarch doesn't affect installs, only updates. > My recommendation is to deprecate exactarch and to have yum work the following > way. > > 1) if you update packages that in installs the same arch(es) as is already > installed. except for all the cases where that breaks b/c a package legitimately changes arch: i386->noarch? > 2) If I install a package it should install just the basearch package unless > told otherwise by the .arch extension. An additional extension (.all) can be > used to may yum install all available arches. This might be reasonable but how well does that replicate to update and remove, for consistency? 'yum remove foo' only removes foo.$basearch? That sounds a bit odd to me. -sv
