i386 RPMs in x86_64 repos?

[Sam Varshavchik]

Paul Howarth writes:

> Unlikely to help. The trend is towards having *more* i386 packages in 
> the x86_64 repo, not less. See:
> 
> http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-October/msg00722.html
> 
> Whilst some of us would like to be able to easily install a "pure" 
> 64-bit system, some regard the omission of 32-bit support as "crippling 
> the OS".

It would be nice if a representative of this "some" group please explain 
exactly what exactly is being "crippled" in the OS, unless you stuff a 
crapload of i686 gunk into it?

I must've been out of town, recently, but I thought that Fedora was supposed 
to be a distribution based solely on free and open source software.  So I 
really don't understand WTF anyone needs the i686 crap for.  If I want to 
install any FOSS software I get it, build it, and install it.  Naturally, it 
gets built as native 64bit code.  So what do I need the 32bit code for, 
again?

So, I have my Opteron box in front of me.  Please explain, in detail, what 
I'll be able to do with it, if I stuff it full of redundant 32bit crap, that 
I can't do with it right now?

There's absolutely nothing, as long as I stay within the boundaries of FOSS. 
The only reason, and let's be honest, for 32bit support is to run 32bit OEM 
binary blobs, mostly browser plugins or other 32bit crap (Acrobat, etc…)

Now, my recollection was that, in the past, the Fedora folks were quite 
insistent that the Fedora project is not going to expend any significant 
effort to support or maintain proprietary closed-source code.

Obviously there's been a change in policy, because that's the only possible 
reason for putting i686 packages into 64bit Fedora.  Yes, I do remember that 
a while ago some software (openoffice.org specifically) didn't compile for 
64bit, but that's been fixed now.  But there's no reason to install a 
crapload of 32bit libraries, any more, just to support openoffice.

Actually, I suspect that there's a second reason to still have 32bit 
libraries in Fedora -- RHAS, or specifically the forthcoming RHAS5.  RHAS 
does nave, IRC, third party OEM closed source binary-blobs, and I suspect 
that some of the non-free software in RHAS5 is not available for x86_64.  So 
Red Hat wants to keep as little difference as possible between the source 
trees of Fedora and RHAS.

And that, I suspect is the real reason Anaconda foisted on me all that crap 
I spent nearly a whole day carefully removing.  I blew away nearly two 
hundred 32bit packages, roughly.  Had to do it manually, a few packages at a 
time, by hand -- rpm's multilib support is buggy, and a single monstrous rpm 
-e ends up deleting a lot of stuff it should not've removed.  After removing 
each set of i686 packages, I had to carefully reinstall the x86_64 versions, 
in order to recover all the files that were wrongly removed.


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