Noarch subpackage problem

[Florian Festi]

I think the technical reasons and arguments have been all already mentioned. 
So there are only a few minor remarks:

Although I compiled some quite comprehensive lists of packages to be 
changed/split to noarch it is not intended to blindly switch over all of 
them. If you feel uncomfortable with one or several of your packages being 
changed just leave them as they are. As a general rule of thumb: If there 
are doubt whether it is a good idea to change a package leave it alone.

Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
 > But building things as arch specific subpackages when they could be
 > noarch is a feature that costs us what exactly?  A bit of space?

I think you underestimate the amount of noarch data in the distribution. 
 From approximately 40 GB of content (in files) about 29 GB are not arch 
dependent while there are only 10.7GB of binaries and libraries. Even if you 
assume that the noarch content is compressed twice as good as the binaries 
the larger part of the distribution is still packaged noarch content. Right 
now about half of the noarch content already is in regular noarch packages.

So even if we only save about 10GB of mirror space for one release for now 
it sums up over time for updates and new releases. I even expect that the 
percentage of noarch content is increasing in the future and every new 
supported architecture will automatically gain from the work done (if there 
going to be any).

Florian