On Sunday 12 March 2006 14:57, Simon Stelling wrote:
I'm a member of the Gentoo/AMD64 team which is working hard on getting true multilib support.
Great. Finally doing the right thing.
1. Take a package that provides both libraries and binaries. Install it both 64bit and 32bit. How are the conflicting files in /usr/bin (well, anything in PATH) handled? Do you simply end up with having whatever was first/latest installed or is 64bit preferred over 32bit or vice versa?
Normally rpm doesn't allow duplicated files. There are a couple of ways to handle it: - You use special compat packages for the 32bit libraries that don't contain anything in $PATH or in /usr/include, only libraries That is what the core SUSE distribution does. This avoids the problem completely. - You can overwrite the duplicate check with --force. Then the latest wins.[I suspect a lot of people do that for third party rpms]. It's a bit unclean though because it makes the rpm database inconsistent. - Better: you can filter out some paths during rpm installation using --excludepath. With that it is possible to tell rpm to just not i nstall the wrong bins. So e.g. to get just the libraries you would typically exclude */include and */bin -Andi