Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 14, 2012 23:50 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by mathstuf
Parent article: Quotes of the week

On an x86_64 system, you can install i686 packages. But then you have already base x86_64 userland packages installed, especially those with shared libs. Additional package installations will cause conflicts with those base-installed packages.

On an i686 installation, no x86_64 kernel package is available, like it is in Debian. "yum list 'kernel*'" tells so.

Of course, you can always create your own completely-self-made-up package list and use Anaconda or AutoYast or such. But this is what I called "roll-your-own installation" above, then you create a spin. It is not an installation mode that is supported by a distribution out-of-the box -- which is what I was asking for.

I don't deny that it ain't possible; after all, one can also always roll one's own kernel and install that. I hinted to the fact that such an installation mode is not widespread because it is *not a mode commonly offered by distributions*.

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Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 17, 2012 8:29 UTC (Sun) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]

> On an x86_64 system, you can install i686 packages. But then you have already base x86_64 userland packages installed, especially those with shared libs. Additional package installations will cause conflicts with those base-installed packages.

That's just not true.
You can install those just fine ... they won't conflict because the shared libraries go into different directories (lib vs lib64). Which is the whole point of multilib. Binaries in both packages won't conflict either because rpm has a concept of "coloring" which means if you install foo.i686 and foo.x86_64 and both ship /usr/bin/foo it *wont* conflict. /usr/bin/foo will just be the x86_64 one.

Name examples of what you mean. You might just have hit some kind of packing bug for a specific library but they are designed to not conflict and it works fine for me here.