Please see bug #189958 as well, which I'm guessing has been misfiled under libgnome instead of yum. Basically, if a user has both 32 and 64 bit versions of a package installed, yum will occasionally give what turns out to be a cryptic error message. e.g. Transaction Check Error: file /usr/share/easytag/ChangeLog from install of easytag-1.99.13-1.fc6 conflicts with file from package easytag-1.99.12-3.fc6 file /usr/share/man/man1/easytag.1.gz from install of easytag-1.99.13-1.fc6 conflicts with file from package easytag-1.99.12-3.fc6 It's especially maddening because yum doesn't report the arch when it shows the error, so unless the user knows what he/she is looking at, the error reported reads like the new package is conflicting with the one it's supposed to be replacing. I believe this only happens when the 32 bit version of an update isn't available .
This is a bug in the package; if it's intended to be multilib (and thus gets pushed to the repo as such), then it shouldn't have file conflicts like this.
This means that at least half of core, updates and extras are broken. How do you expect things like man pages, which NEED to be installed for each arch of the package, to be handled? No problems happen if you upgrade both packages simultaneously, so it seems to me that if there is a problem when you upgrade only ONE of the two, it's a bug.
No, it isn't a bug. Having multilib packages of mismatched versions installed (e.g. foo.1.2-3.x86_64 and foo.1.2-1.i386) isn't supported. The installed 64-bit and 32-bit versions of a multilib package have to be the exact same version and release, which means you always have to update them together.
I hadn't seen this as a version issue.. In my experience, this has been happening when I have foo.1.2-3.x86_64, and then I install foo.1.2-3.i386 and get the error. But it's just as likely that I haven't been paying attention to the release number and perhaps the 32 bit and 64 bit repositories are occasionally slightly out of sync (which is why this error only shows up occasionally and not on every update).