Tom Horsley wrote:
Well, whatever undocumented crap it does that allows both i386 and x86_64 rpms to install "the same" files (which are in fact obviously different) is clearly a wart about the size of the titanic.
No, that's a feature and it lets you run packages that haven't been rebuilt for x86_64 and need 32 bit libraries (what, you have a single source for software?).
I'm talking far more insane stuff than that. Things like foobar.i386.rpm and foobar.x86_64.rpm both being installed at the same time and both "owning" the file /usr/bin/foobar when you can look at /usr/bin/foobar and see that it is clearly an x86_64 executable and did not under any circumstances come from foobar.i386.rpm.
This became far more obvious in FC6 when the default x86_64 install seemed to also install every single version of the corresponding i386 package as well (libraries I can understand, but this is junk like utility programs which couldn't possibly need to have a 32 bit version installed).
Not sure what's wrong there, but I don't think it is inherent in yum or rpm. I have CentOS x86_64 installs that seem to have the right things except for the accidental inclusion of perl.i386 in the initial release.