Johnny Hughes wrote:
There is a variable in yum.conf called multilib_policy ...
The default in CentOS 5 is all ... the default in CentOS 6 is best.
Ah, ok. Part of my playing around with 6.2 ist finding all the differences with respect to 5.x. ;)
I can tell you that I would personally use something like mock to build or 32-bit items in at least a clean chroot when building/compiling 32 bit things on a 64-bit machine. But to each their own.
I'm somehow confused with all of you loathing biarch so much. I can partly understand this from a packagers point of view, but as an end user?
What you get at the end if you install both 32-bit and 64-bit packages is the 32-bit stuff in (basically) /usr/lib. Otherwise nothing changes. So the added stuff _is_ cleanly separated from the rest of the system.
The kernel runs 32-bit and 64-bit programs anyway, gcc has '-m32' (you cannot even get rid of this), and all you you need to compile an run 32-bit programs is the extra stuff in /usr/lib. (The include/doc/etc. files which are in both packages _must_ be identical, that's checked.)
All the Unix systems from the old days (Irix, Solaris, AIX, ...) had this long before Linux saw 64 bits.
I like this feature very much, I and several others are using it on 5.x for years now, and nobody ever complained.
The only problems I ever had were with you, Dear Packagers/Rebuilders. Sometimes you forgot the updated 32-bit package from the x64 updates repo, an in one case they were even really clashing in an unallowed way. Your fault again. :)
So: what's the beef?
-Michael