yum and multiple architectures... more pain!

[Jarod Wilson]

On Feb 25, 2008, at 5:16 PM, Andrea wrote:

> Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 21:39 +0000, Andrea wrote:
>> SDL-devel requires alsa-lib-devel
>> Foo-devel requires alsa-lib-devel
>> There's no direct relation between SDL-devel and Foo-devel.
>> yum remove alsa-lib-devel removes both SDL-devel Foo-devel, since  
>> they
>> both required alsa-lib-devel. yum install SDL-devel only install
>> SDL-devel and its requirements, which do not include Foo-devel.
>
> Sorry, my case is different

No, it isn't. You don't fully understand how rpm dependencies work.  
And I suppose I didn't fully explain either. See below.

> 3 packages are installed:
>
> SDL-devel.ppc64
> SDL-devel.ppc
> alsa-lib-devel.ppc64
>
> alsa-lib-devel.ppc is NOT installed
>
> For sure SDL-devel.ppc64 depends on alsa-lib-devel.ppc64.
> The I have to guess that SDL-devel.ppc depends on alsa-lib- 
> devel.ppc64 too. (a bit strange though)
> Otherwise I could not be installed.
>
> Then I remove alsa-lib-devel.ppc64 and yum removes
>
> alsa-lib-devel.ppc64
> SDL-devel.ppc64
> SDL-devel.ppc
>
> Then when I install SDL-devel.ppc, yum installs
>
> SDL-devel.ppc
> alsa-lib-devel.ppc
>
> So it looks like alsa-lib-devel.ppc and alsa-lib-devel.ppc64 are  
> equivalent (for yum).
> That is not possible since
>
> /usr/lib/libasound.so is only part of ppc version
> /usr/lib64/libasound.so is only part of ppc64 version.

SDL-devel Requires: alsa-lib-devel. Both alsa-lib-devel.ppc and alsa- 
lib-devel.ppc64 Provides: alsa-lib-devel. End of story, from rpm's  
perspective. Now, yum tries to be a bit brighter, and when no required  
bit is installed on a multi-arch system, it'll try to get the package  
that provides the required bits, of the same arch. As has been  
mentioned before, multi-lib is a bit messy. RPM and package  
dependencies were created long before people were running multi-lib 64- 
bit systems.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com