[Fedora-packaging] Re: RPM weirdness [moved from fedora-list]

[Philip Prindeville]

Rex Dieter wrote:

>Philip Prindeville wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I'm still not clear, though:  if the file being installed is part of the
>>sources that's being built (i.e. it's not a generated file), and the
>>makefile that does the install invoked "cp --preserve=timestamps"
>>then both the .i386 and the .x86_64 copies should have an identical
>>timestamp.  Right?
>>    
>>
>
>Consider the case where the installed file(s) are build-time generated.
> These are *very* unlikely to have identical timestamps (having been
>built separately on different archs/buildhosts).
>
>-- Rex
>  
>

I would have thought that to be much less common.  Also, sometimes the
jitter between the .x86_64 and the .i386 files are only a few seconds
(often less than 30).

It shouldn't be too hard to cache the timestamp on one of those files,
and if the MD5 checksum and size are identical, then substitute in the
previous timestamp...  Say always using the .i386 timestamp, for
instance.

The downside to that is that if you find a bug that only affects .x86_64
architecture (not that unlikely), then you have to kick out both binary
RPM's with new version numbers.  It also means that when building,
you'd always have to build the "reference" architecture first.

-Philip