[Lula] Fedora multiarch

[Joe Bayes]

Hi folks,

I'm running Fedora 8 on an Athlon64. 

When I installed Fedora 8, many packages were installed as both an i386
and an x86_64 version:

spoo:~$ rpm -q nspr
nspr-4.6.7-3.fc8.i386
nspr-4.6.7-3.fc8.x86_64
spoo:~$ 

My questions are:

1) Why does Fedora install packages for both architectures? I
understand that perhaps some i386 packages are installed to satisfy
dependencies of other packages that are only available on i386, but
many of these packages aren't dependencies for any other installed
package. 

2) Will I break something if I remove the i386 version of packages for
which the x86_64 version is also installed, and which aren't required
for any dependencies? (I don't mind the extra disk space, but I'd like
to avoid having to download BOTH copies of Firefox every time they
push an update.) 

3) Some files are owned by both versions of the package:

spoo:~$ rpm -qf /usr/bin/artsd
arts-1.5.8-4.fc8.x86_64
arts-1.5.8-4.fc8.i386
spoo:~$ 

So, is /usr/bin/artsd x86_64 code, or i386 code? It doesn't depend on
which one was installed last, does it? 

Joe

--
Joe Bayes -- jbayes at spoo.mminternet.com