noarch rpm feature query/issue

[Peter Robinson]

>> 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.

Thanks for the clarification, ultimately it was an oversight on my
part, and the package review. Maybe one of the easy ways to pick it up
is a check in rpmlint.

Cheers,
Peter