Description of problem: If I understand the situation correctly while installing x86_64 and i386 version of some package the one for i386 should be installed first and the one for x86_64 on the top of it to resolve possible conflicts correctly. When installing packages in the same transactions yum does the above; but if, for example, the current update for openoffice.org pulls in libidn.i386, curl.i386, readline.i386 and python.i386 then this ordering is disturbed as x86_64 variants were installed already some time ago. One would think that yum should check for such situation and force a reinstallation of required x86_64 packages if they were indeed already present on a system. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): yum-2.1.12-2
That's not correct. They don't have to be installed in a particular order. All the multilib handling in rpm has to do is install the binaries so that the compat binary is the one that is kept. it always does this and it has nothing to do with the order the packages are installed.