[Repost] What is "Error: Protected multilib versions"

[M A Young]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2012, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

> I still get this error several times a week, and I still have no idea
> what it means or how I'm supposed to respond to it (other than
> fiddling randomly with packages until it goes away).
>
> The latest one:
>
> # yum install /usr/sbin/libvirtd
> [... yum spew deleted ...]
> Error: Protected multilib versions: libvirt-client-0.9.10-2.fc17.i686 != libvirt-client-0.9.10-3.fc17.x86_64
>
> $ rpm -qa | grep libvirt-client
> libvirt-client-0.9.10-3.fc17.x86_64
>
> What does the error mean?

You can get this when a package wants the older version of (in this case) 
libvirt-client and tries to pull in the i686 version to resolve the 
dependency when it doesn't specify a particular arch.

 	Michael Young