Heads up: Noarch Subpackages

[Ville Skyttä]

On Thursday 12 February 2009, Florian Festi wrote:
> With version 4.6.0 RPM supports subpackages being noarch by just
> adding "BuildArch: noarch" to their subpackage section in the spec
> file. There now is a Feature [1] that tries to bring noarch
> subpackages to Fedora. There are still some koji fixes that need to
> hit the Fedora build system. So noarch subpackages DO NOT WORK within
> Fedora YET. We hope that this can be solved soon. Watch out for koji
> outages.

Regarding policy changes, one candidate for addition would be that if a 
non-noarch package does noarch subpackages, it MUST BuildRequire rpm-build >= 
4.6.0.  Or if there's a way to wrap the "BuildArch: noarch" for subpackages 
in a %if $something ... %endif where $something evaluates to true only in 
rpmbuild versions supporting these noarch subpackages, that'd be ok too.  
This is because if such a package is built with an earlier rpmbuild version, 
the build can succeed but not only the one expected subpackage will be 
noarch, but so will/may be the main package and all other subpackages as 
well.  These builds often fail because of invalid options ending up passed 
to ./configure or debuginfo extracted but not packaged, but there are 
scenarios where the build doesn't fail and chaos ensues.

What about F-10, and noarch-subpackage updates to packages that were all 
arch-specific before be shipped for it, or if this is F-11+ only?  This is 
obviously dependent on whether the needed infrastructure changes include 
support for doing this for F-10 as well, but I think it'd be nice to be 
explicit about it in case it'd be technically doable in the infrastructure 
but no go for some other reasons.

The steps needed section in wiki contains a "rpmlint (?)" entry; FWIW I can't 
think of anything offhand that would actually be broken in it by this change.  
There's a chance for some additional false positives in spec file checks, and 
it doesn't have any additional checks related to this new feature, but 
otherwise I suppose it would be pretty much ok.