Duplicate packages-rpm
 

Hi folks,

I came to notice that there are alot of duplicate packages on my FC3. The problem is that these packages are from different archs so when I want to erase them 'rpm' reports an error that there are multiple packages.

Can anybody tell me how I can get rid of these duplicates.

Thank you all.

Typically you install a single rpm - the multiple rpm's you are seeing are likely just the bundles and not actually installed. (In fact doing rpm -qa to see what is installed often just gives the basic name of the package and leaves out architecture extra information.)

Anyway removing a file with name something.rpm only removes the package you use to install it from. It doesn't actually uninstall it. You should be able to remove such packages that way.

You can query an rpm and see the architectures with:

rpm -q --qf '%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE} %{ARCH}\n' packagename

For example:

rpm -q --qf '%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE} %{ARCH}\n' kernel

Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to remove a specific package by architecture, so you will need to use '--allmatches' (and likely with --nodeps, since other package dependancies will be temporarily broken) and then reinstall the one you want.

Before you do that, sometimes an i386 package is needed by an installed program that doesn't have an x86_64 version. Just removing the package may then break other software. Unless you have a reason to do this, it's best to leave the package alone.