FC5T3: Duplicate packages installed

[Jonathan Berry]

On 2/26/06, Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-02-26 at 15:36 -0600, Jonathan Berry wrote:
> > Why is this not the default queryformat for x86_64?  It would cut down
> > on a lot of confusion and noise for those new to the x86_64 platform.
> > And I do not see what it would hurt to make it default in all cases if
> > it complicates things to make it default for only x86_64.  It's fairly
> > simple to add this to your .rpmmacros, but the people who will know to
> > do this will already know about the dual-arch stuff.
>
> Because changing the expected output of rpm -q is a bad bad thing.
> Don't do that.  Of course people shouldn't be screen scraping the output
> or relying on it w/out doing their own --qf for ensured stability,
> people do anyway, and we'd rather not break all their scripts.

I see where you are coming from, but on x86_64 you essentially must
add the arch into the rpm queryformat, so you could have this issue
anyway.  Why should we support people if they are not doing the right
thing (using -q instead of -qf)?  Why should we not fix something
because it will break backwards compatibility?  OSS seems to do this
all the time, eg the kernel or the recent glibc ABI change.  Of
course, we could debate whether this problem needs fixing, but from my
point of view, it does.  The default output on x86_64 is ambiguous.  I
don't intend to be argumentative, and I think backwards compatibility
is usually a good thing, but sometimes you just have to break it to
improve something.  Well, there you have my opinion : ).

Jonathan