MinGW packaging guidelines were recently approved for Fedora: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/MinGW Most MinGW packages are 'noarch'. The reason is that although they contain Windows binary code for Windows/i386, they are noarch from the point of view of the build architecture (Fedora/i386/ppc/whatever). Thus it is OK for these packages to contain, for example, *.a, *.dll and *.exe Windows binary files. Example: mingw32-gdbm.noarch: E: arch-independent-package-contains-binary-or-object /usr/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/lib/libgdbm.dll.a (bug 467391) If you wanted to be really specific here, it's OK for them to contain only Windows COFF files: $ file /usr/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/lib/libgdbm.dll.a /usr/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/lib/libgdbm.dll.a: current ar archive $ cd /tmp $ mkdir unpack $ cd unpack/ $ ar x /usr/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/lib/libgdbm.dll.a $ file * d000000.o: 80386 COFF executable not stripped - version 24932 d000001.o: 80386 COFF executable not stripped - version 30821 [...] If a MinGW noarch package contained Fedora native binaries then that shouldn't happen and it would be a bug.
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 10 development cycle. Changing version to '10'. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
Closing - rpmlint no longer reports this as a problem.