Paul Howarth writes:
Unlikely to help. The trend is towards having *more* i386 packages in the x86_64 repo, not less. See:http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-October/msg00722.htmlWhilst some of us would like to be able to easily install a "pure" 64-bit system, some regard the omission of 32-bit support as "crippling the OS".
It would be nice if a representative of this "some" group please explain exactly what exactly is being "crippled" in the OS, unless you stuff a crapload of i686 gunk into it?
I must've been out of town, recently, but I thought that Fedora was supposed to be a distribution based solely on free and open source software. So I really don't understand WTF anyone needs the i686 crap for. If I want to install any FOSS software I get it, build it, and install it. Naturally, it gets built as native 64bit code. So what do I need the 32bit code for, again?
So, I have my Opteron box in front of me. Please explain, in detail, what I'll be able to do with it, if I stuff it full of redundant 32bit crap, that I can't do with it right now?
There's absolutely nothing, as long as I stay within the boundaries of FOSS. The only reason, and let's be honest, for 32bit support is to run 32bit OEM binary blobs, mostly browser plugins or other 32bit crap (Acrobat, etc…)
Now, my recollection was that, in the past, the Fedora folks were quite insistent that the Fedora project is not going to expend any significant effort to support or maintain proprietary closed-source code.
Obviously there's been a change in policy, because that's the only possible reason for putting i686 packages into 64bit Fedora. Yes, I do remember that a while ago some software (openoffice.org specifically) didn't compile for 64bit, but that's been fixed now. But there's no reason to install a crapload of 32bit libraries, any more, just to support openoffice.
Actually, I suspect that there's a second reason to still have 32bit libraries in Fedora -- RHAS, or specifically the forthcoming RHAS5. RHAS does nave, IRC, third party OEM closed source binary-blobs, and I suspect that some of the non-free software in RHAS5 is not available for x86_64. So Red Hat wants to keep as little difference as possible between the source trees of Fedora and RHAS.
And that, I suspect is the real reason Anaconda foisted on me all that crap I spent nearly a whole day carefully removing. I blew away nearly two hundred 32bit packages, roughly. Had to do it manually, a few packages at a time, by hand -- rpm's multilib support is buggy, and a single monstrous rpm -e ends up deleting a lot of stuff it should not've removed. After removing each set of i686 packages, I had to carefully reinstall the x86_64 versions, in order to recover all the files that were wrongly removed.
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