noarch rpm feature query/issue
Mike Bonnet
mikeb at redhat.com
Fri Apr 3 18:30:35 UTC 2009
Peter Robinson wrote:
> I have a query about the new noarch feature for building rpms. I have
> a package called gupnp-vala which the contents there of can be noarch.
> It built fine in koji as noarch so I presume it passed the rpmdiff or
> what ever is run against the rpms. But it contains a pkgconfig file
> which is located in /usr/lib or /usr/lib64 so pacakges built against
> it (none actually in Fedora yet, but one awaiting review) fail to
> build on either 32 or 64 bit platforms depending on which of the build
> packages gets the lime light.
>
> So my query is, I presume due to the pkgconfig this package shouldn't
> be noarch, so there must be a bug there somewhere which caused it to
> get past koji. But as its noarch AFAICT other than the location of the
> pkgconfig file it seems somewhat of a waste to lose the advantage of
> the noarch stuff for the sake of a pkgconfig file as I presume most
> devel packages could be noarch.
The rpmdiff you're talking about is only run against noarch
*subpackages*. This is a noarch base package, and like every other
package, we assume the maintainer is handling arch issues appropriately.
In this case, a noarch package should not be dropping files under
%{_lib}, since this will obviously be different depending on which arch
it was built on. Maybe there should be a check in redhat-rpm-config to
avoid this? I'm not sure how noarch packages are supposed to handle
pkgconfig files.
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> BTW I see noarch packages are located in each of the separate arch
> trees as opposed to being in a noarch dir which looks like the
> advantage of the noarch in space saving isn't happening. What other
> advantages does it offer?
noarch packages are often hardlinked into the different dirs, so though
they appear multiple times they don't consume additional space.
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