Installing RealPlayer on FC+FE devel x86_64

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Hi,

I've just spent some hours in deep hell trying to install RealPlayer on
a Fedora Devel x86_64 box. It was a long time I haven't been in such
trouble and I must say I do very well without it. So I thought it would
be interesting to share what I found there :

- the rpm on https://player.helixcommunity.org/ is deeply f*-up as
usual, thanksfuly Rex Dieter provides a semi-sane nosrc.rpm on
KDE-Redhat. You just need to adapt it a "little" to the latest Helix
binary dump (see later)

- usual version changes
- make %setup create the root build dir
- patch the realplay script so it actually sets HELIX_LIBS
- remove some stuff installed but not packaged

- rpm didn't want to build an i586 rpm on x86_64 -> make the build arch
noarch, redefine _libdir and _lib to something sane (not lib64). This is
FUGLY but I didn't find any other way to coax rpm into building.

- now you've build a package that can be installed. It "just" needs a
bunch of *i386* packages in FE and livna. (one step the Helix package
"forgets" as it's not checking dependencies)

- This is where I spent most of the time, trying to figure out why yum
didn't want to pull them. Why but WHY don't livna and FE provide
arch-specific mirrorlists. And WHY can't yum look up in x86_64 AND i386
when presented a generic mirrorlist. (deep anguish, wanted to murder
someone when I realised that's why everything was failing). Yum ONLY
searches in x86_64 when you use the default mirrorlists, you have to
create separate livna and FE entries without any mirrorlist and only the
i386 baseurl to make it work. This of course sucks for the root server,
but at this point I was past caring about being nice.

Anyway, now everything works there, I'll be stressing a bit FE & Livna
i386 root servers from now on, but that's real life for you. Hope this
message helps others.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot