On Nov 1, 2008, at 10:59 PM, Rob See wrote:

> Jeff,
>
>   There is no failure message, yum just silently ignores all non  
> i86pc packages in a repo.
>

OK.

The first thing is to verify what rpm thinks your platform is, "i86pc"  
is atypical.

rpm --showrc will show what rpm thinks your platform is.

You can change the platform by putting a CPU-VENDOR-OS string
into /etc/rpm/platform. E.g. you can pretend to be a "bing-bang-boom"
platform by doing
	echo "bing-bang-boom" > /etc/rpm/platform

The same file can also be used to add platform affinity patterns,
like compatibility with noarch. But is platform affinity regex's are  
__NOT__
supplied, the default rpm behavior should accept any arch, certainly
"noarch" packages.

So what does
	rpm --showrc | head -n 20
have to say on OpenSolaris?

IIRC, yum has an internal arch affinity table, rpm has a "known arch"
table that is used for parsing compound dependencies and query  
arguments.

Any particular reason why the more typical "i386" can't be used  
instead of "i86pc"?

But adding "i86pc" a couple of places should "work" too.

73 de Jeff