Yum - Different OS version and Arch

Michael Schwendt mschwendt at gmail.com
Sun Nov 14 10:37:28 UTC 2010


On Sun, 14 Nov 2010 15:51:44 +0530, Sawrub wrote:

> > Packages, which have not been rebuilt for F-14, may still contain an
> > older distribution tag (such as ".fc12") in their package release name.
>
> That was clear that searching for a packages under the repos may list a 
> package that is not of the same OS version [if its not build for that 
> version]

The dist tag in the package name isn't as important as you may think it is.

The packages just haven't been _rebuilt_ for various reasons. First of all,
there hasn't been a mass-rebuild of _all_ packages for F-14, because no
compiler upgrade required/justified doing that. Second, the package's
build dependencies probably haven't changed either. Nowhere is written
that a package built _on_ F-12 would no longer work on F-13 or F-14.
Whether it requires a rebuild depends on several factors. Third, the
packaged software might not have seen an update by its authors either.

> all i wanted was to know that why are they included in the 
> results for a different version of OS.

Because [hopefully] they continue to work and [hopefully] the package
maintainer has verified that they still work without a rebuild.

> Since as i have read that 
> installing packages like this ['OS version xx' packages under 'OS 
> version yy' ] should not be encouraged.

Where?

> And since YUM is there to make 
> package installation easy, practices like this should not be there there.

Who says that? Do you get any errors when trying to install the packages?
Or when you run the software?

> > With the x86_64 arch you can also install and run i686 for 32-bit
> > compatibility. Not all i686 packages are available in the Yum repository
> > for x86_64, though. Just a subset.
> >
> Yes that i know, all i wanted to say here is that is it a good practice 
> to list a package of different arch when the one for the requested is 
> not available under the default search. Packages of different arch 
> [except noarch] should only be listed against a special YUM option [like 
> --enable-different-arch] or be listed under a different head in the 
> default listing [like --Different Architecture--].

You can configure your Yum to exclude i686 packages, if you don't need
them for anything.


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