[Rpm-maint] unexpected file conflict behavior

[Florian Festi]

steven chen wrote:
>  Hi,
> 
> Good day.
> Recently I had a weird situation where I can install two rpms together (in
> one line) without any errors but once I install them one after the other, I
> got a file conflict errors. When looking closedly, the files that complain
> about conflicting are actually owned by both packages.
> Can anyone please shed some lights on me why installing them together will
> work? (I actually expect to see file conflict error there too).
> Thanks in advance.

To fix that file conflict the files in the both packages need to be exactly 
the same (md5, owner, group, ...). As this is sometimes difficult to achieve 
for a multilib situation (as this) this test was lowered in the dark ages so 
that at least most installations will somehow work. This is of course 
nonsense and has already be changed back in rpm upstream (>=4.6). So not 
issuing an file conflict is an (already fixed) bug in rpm.

While some of these multilib file conflicts are packaging bugs it is also 
possible that this conflict just tells you to install only one architecture 
of this devel package.

Florian