F19 upgrade pulls in a lot of i686 packages

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 30 Jun 2013 17:03:58 +0200, Heiko Adams wrote:

> But why doesn't prevent yum packages with arch != ($Basearch, noarch)
> from being pulled in by default?

Yum developers can answer that. Probably such a prevention technique is
not implemented, because it would require checks that might not be 100%
without user-intervention.

That's one reason why we're adding %_isa to package dependencies.
To make deps more strict and safer, but that doesn't help with Obsoletes
yet.

"noarch -> arch" means the installed package was for "no particular arch"
(= "any arch"). If that noarch package gets replaced, one way is to
install the replacement package for all archs it's available for, which is
as close to "any arch" as it can get for a multi-arch platform (and
packages, which might have been installed only because they are included
in some comps group).

Also remember, a dependency on just the "khrplatform-devel" package name
can be resolved with either the i686 or the x86_64 build. If you remove
khrplatform-devel.noarch from a pure x86_64 installation and replace it
with khrplatform-devel.x86_64, that might be okay for the x86_64 run-time,
but something has been taken away (since noarch is for more archs than
x86_64). Then, if you install i686 packages with a dependency on the
khrplatform-devel package name, Yum would need to guess that the x86_64
build of that package might be insufficient. Not pretty.

> It doesn't make sense to install i.e.
> x86_64 packages on an i686 System.

That's the reverse scenario from above. On that "i686 System", available
noarch packages are also for x86_64. When removing noarch packages and
replacing them with just a single arch build, you remove _something_
which you may need to add later. Unless the user configures the system
to tell that it will stay x86_64 only.

> So those packages should be ignored
> comletely by yum as long as the user doesn't instruct yum explicit to
> install them.

Again, if the package installer by default "takes away" something
(when replacing noarch packages), that might be missing later.

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