Comments on: RHEL/CentOS bi-arch problems

By: sven

sven — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:35:01 +0000

Unfortunately, I agree with you. However, in medium to big companies, you really need the guarantee for commercial support. Be it for software like Oracle which is only officially supported on certain operating systems or for hardware like fibre channel adapters which only has official drivers for certain versions of certain operating systems….
So all in all, there isn’t much choice there…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:14:23 +0000

RHEL barely supports *one* architecture at a time.

By: sven

sven — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:32:05 +0000

No, I didn’t really have this issue for the first time, but I also had the problem of two packages sharing a file with different content (though it was a whitespace-only change in a text based configuration – and no, whitespace was not relevant to syntax) not being installed side-by-side because of that differing content.
Perhaps overwriting is only done when installing the exact same package (name and version), with just the architecture differing, but if package names differ, the contents are checked for differences…
Stupid in many ways IMHO. Though I can’t offer a less stupid, working solution. Except such packages to declare some conflict with other architecture versions of themself. Not sure how conflicts get resolved in the RPM world though, I just know dpkg/deb is rock-solid in this regard.

By: Roguelazer

Roguelazer — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:46:06 +0000

I’m surprised that this is the first time you’ve run into this. Many libraries (e.g., tclx) come in both 32- and 64-bit versions, try to install both in /usr/lib/, and use the same exact filename. rpm seems to have no problems with installing both and just silently overwriting whichever one is installed first. >.<