== An interesting issue when _yum_ upgraded _gaim_

A while back, the Gaim chat program got renamed to Pidgin for
complicated reasons. Fedora duly released a _pidgin_ package that said
it replaced the old _gaim_ package, and I duly typed _yum update_ on my
[[x86_64|]] machine, and things came to a screeching halt with errors
about [[file conflicts RPMMultiarchFileProblem]]. It turned out that the
updates repository had both the i386 and the [[x86_64|]] versions of
pidgin, and yum was picking the i386 version, which depended on various
i386 packages that conflict with the [[x86_64|]] RPMs that I already
had.

One reason that this could happen comes down to package naming. Namely,
Fedora made the decision not to burn the package's architecture into
the package name itself (unlike in the Debian world, where there would
have been _pidgin_ and _pidgin-i386_ packages). This meant that both
versions of _pidgin_ could assert that they replaced _gaim_, as opposed
to something like 'pidgin-i386 replaces gaim-i386' for the lesser
architecture.

In turn this is pretty much necessary to keep package naming sensible
and not make a bunch of extra work as you migrate and not have packages
that only differ in name. Otherwise, a native i386 only machine would
have 'pidgin', but the exact same bits would be called 'pidgin-i386' on
a multi-architecture machine.

(The way around this sort of issue is something like ((yum update
pidgin.x86_64)); this gets _yum_ to pick the right version as the
update.)