I was thinking this morning again about how we could deal with the 32-bit on 64-bit
problem. On Fedora 24 and newer, we have the ability to use rich RPM dependencies
(Recommends: sssd-client.i686 if glibc.i686) That doesn't help on older Fedora or RHEL
systems though.
What if we were to split the nss_sss.so.2 library into its own subpackage and then turn
off the automatic dependency generation for it? We could then have sssd-common Requires:
the one for the same arch and Recommends: the one for the other architecture (or Requires:
for older systems that don't support Recommends:)
The result would be that default installations of the OS could have both versions of
nss_sss.so.2 but of course the 32-bit one wouldn't actually do anything unless someone
installs glibc.i686 (or it is pulled in by something else).
This would not be an approach I would recommend in general, but the NSS client is a
special case: it's only meaningful if glibc is installed because otherwise nothing
would ever call into it. Even for the primary arch, it's a safe assumption that glibc
will always be installed at least for that arch, so there's no reason to add that
dependency explicitly.