Noarch subpackage problem

[Toshio Kuratomi]

So we had a discussion on IRC today about the failure cases of noarch
subpackages.  I think we should make some changes to the way we check
that noarch subpackages are sane.

Currently, when a noarch subpackage is built, rpmdiff is run on the
noarch packages that were built by each builder.

Of the checks that rpmdiff does, we discard all of them except Provides,
Requires, and the list of files.  My concern is that if you throw out
md5sum and filesize in these checks there's a lot of margin for creating
subpackages that are not actually noarch.

For instance, if bitedness ends up in include files that are placed in a
noarch subpackage, those subpackages won't be caught by this check.
That would allow a package to go out that could prevent building with
the incorrect header.

The reason that filesize and md5sum are discarded is that
arch-inspecific files can have timestamps embedded into them at build
time.  This means, for instance, that documentation can differ between
builds of a subpackage despite it being a prime candidate for a noarch
subpackage.

An idea for a change would be to extend rpmdiff to be able to list
changes in md5sum between all files except those marked as %doc.  This
would let documentation packages through even if timestamps were
embedded but not let a noarch package with differing headers through,
for instance.

Thoughts?

-Toshio

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