Description of problem: On my system with i686 installation of Fedora 8 I can't force yum to see x86_64 packages no matter how hard I try. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): yum-3.2.7-1.fc8 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: (In i686 installation) 0. # yum clean all 1. # mv /etc/yum.repos.d{,.away} 2. # mv /etc/yum.conf{,.away} 3. # cat >/etc/yum.conf <<EOF > [main] > exactarch=0 > plugins=0 > > [fedora] > name=fedora > baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Everything/x86_64/os/ > enabled=1 > EOF # yum clean all Actual results: # yum list |grep x86_64 # yum install glibc.x86_64 Setting up Install Process Parsing package install arguments No package glibc.x86_64 available. Nothing to do # Expected results: Being able to list/install the x86_64 packages Additional info: Pardon me if this is not a bug, but my misunderstanding of how yum should work. Please suggest an alternative way to force a package of a different architecture with its dependencies into my system. Thanks!
It doesn't work that way around, x86_64 can install i686 but not the other way around (that way around it just thinks it's an i686 machine).
Thanks for the clarification, James! In that case I am wordering whether I can reopen this bug as a enhancement request? It still makes sense to be able to work with packages of other architectures. Probably just list them, or inspect the metadata if not install. And it might be argued, that yum can not know binaries of which architectures are actually executable on the machine (apart from different kernels it might be due to qemu-arm, or whichever qemu hooked on binfmt_misc, etc).
If you want to do special-case work like that then you need to use the yum api in a program to tell it to do so. It's not a bug in yum that the capability is not exposed on the cli.