[WBEL-users] troubles with yum on ia32e machines (Xeon 64-bit)

[Marcel Gsteiger]

Hi all

I just have installed a proliant ML370G4 (ia32e). After installing kernel-2.4.21-20.EL.ia32e.rpm, yum died with a IndexError: list index out of range message in clientStuff.py, function 'bestversion'.

Further analysis revealed that the problem comes from the fact that my kernel's arch is neither x86_64 nor i386. (i have to use the ia32e kernel to make the box run, the x86_64 kernel does not boot).

Obviously yum is unable to handle the case where there is a package installed for an architecture it does not know about.

I fixed the problem by testing for the case of an empty list before assigning currentarch, as follows:

clientStuff.py:

def bestversion(nevral, name):
    """this takes a nevral and a pkg name - it iterates through them to return
       the list of archs having the highest version number - so if someone has
       package foo.i386 and foo.i686 then we'll get a list of i386 and i686 returned
       minimum of one thing returned"""
    # first we get a list of the archs
    # determine the best e-v-r
    # then we determine the archs that have that version and append them to a list
    returnarchs = []

    archs = archwork.availablearchs(nevral, name)
    # inserted the following line to check for unknown architectures oct 6, 2004 marcel.gsteiger@milprog.ch
    if archs == []: return returnarchs

    currentarch = archs[0]
 (...continued)


archwork.py:

def bestarch(archlist): 
    # inserted the following line to check for unknown architectures oct 6, 2004 marcel.gsteiger@milprog.ch
    if archlist == []: return None
    currentarch = archlist[0]
    for arch in archlist[1:]:
        currentarch = betterarch(currentarch, arch)       
    return currentarch   

After these two modifications, my yum works again (finally...)

Maybe there is an easier solution to this problem...

Regards
--Marcel