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