Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 206927
use multi-arch yum repos instead of multilib x86_64 trees
Last modified: 2014-03-16 23:02:30 EDT
Description of problem: I suggest dropping i386 packages from x86_64 trees in the next release. It would be simpler just to use separate yum repos for x86_64 and i386. Current fc6 x86_64 seems seems to multilib a large part of the distro. Additional info: On my main machine running x86_64 fc5 I current added updates-i386, extras-i386 (and livna-i386) repos and it seems to work just fine.
I'm pretty certain that there would be some conflicts if this were done. not to mention that the CD size for x86_64 would double to 10 CDs, entirely way too much. Bill, any thoughts?
I think it's probably too late for FC6 to do this. It will lead to conflicts in the repo itself post-install; if the user never tries to install certain packages, they won't hit, but they will be there.
Yeah, there are lots of dragons in doing this -- there are packages which aren't multiarch safe and so trying to do this will just cause conflicts for users.
Is this worth even attempting? My vote is no. As far as space on the mirrors, the content is hardlinked, so that's moot. There just seems to be more heartache and pain here than it's worth to me.
To do this properly requires doing multilib (essentially) via a yum plugin of some sort. It hasn't been tried yet.
triaged
For now, we're not doing this.