ANPM, YUM & RPM - platform choices => i386 or i686, or can they "get along"?

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

OK, so I finally "bit the bullet" and went through with ANMP install. Went through the process several times before I got the little "surprises" out of the way (btw: if you have any Python env variables still lingering in your CONFIG.SYS REM them out, as the ANMP installer does not pay attention to this and in the end your ANMP will be non-functional).

Anyways...so I've gone through the "essentials", slowly little by little my previous DLLs (which I used to store in \usr\dll) are being replaced with the new stuff. Not all of it has gone, I still have quite a few of the old stuff kicking around, but no duplicates. And yes, this is now causing a potential problem with WarpIn because the DLLs it thinks are still there are no longer present, although it is smart enough to detect that.

So...I started looking at doing the YUM/RPM install of QT...a package like libqt4 for example shows as i386 platform...and as best as I can tell this is a problem since my whole ANPM/YUM/RPM install was done as i686 right from the start. Am I understanding this correctly? There are several references on various OS/2, Netlabls, ArcaNoae pages that mixing the platform packages may lead to problems and is NOT recommended.

If this is an issue, who is responsible for producing the i686 version?

[Doug Bissett]

There is no problem with mixing platform packages, although it is not recommended. There are a few packages that do not have all of the possibilities (libqt4 seems to be one of them). I understand that i386 is being dropped because it is really redundant, but not all packages have been, or will be, changed.

There is a YUM plugin that will update wrongly installed packages (sounds like you got it done right), and there is a request for ANPM to support doing that, but it is not yet done.

You are right that any manually installed packages (ZIP, WarpIn, etc.), that are replaced by ANPM (RPM/YUM) should be removed to be sure that they do not interfere with the proper packages. Unfortunately, that is not always an easy task. The best approach seems to be to make sure that you install ALL of the packages that every program that you install (or already have installed) require, whether they are already installed, or not. It is pretty easy to install a new program that needs some package that you installed manually, but never updated. Then, some part of that program, that requires the later version, won't work. Trying to sort that out can take a LOT of your time, and it will probably take a LOT of, very valuable, developer time. Just do it right the first time, and everybody will benefit.