Hello Tom,
On Tue, 2012-06-12 at 17:12 +0100, Tom Brown wrote:
To close the loop on this by making the 32 bit tar package available to the system during the update allowed the update to progress as it got pulled in as a dep during the yum run and all was happy.
I suppose my idea that this might not be a multi arch issue is probably bogus. This issue might be worth reporting upstream, although I think you should report this against redhat-lsb, not tar.
It might have something to do with rpm assuming the Requires: /bin/tar in the redhat-lsb spec file to be a i386 binary by default. If you look at that spec file you see that all required libraries have a conditional arch qualifier. Perhaps that is actually needed for explicitly required binaries too. Although that might still cause a catch 22 when upgrading redhat-lsb for both archs as in this case the requirement for one of the archs is still unsatisfied as only one /bin/tar is available. Anyway, probably worth reporting upstream.
Regards, Leonard.