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Let's say my installed package contains both architecture-specific and nonspecific components. For instance, the SNMP library (code, and MIB files). I'd like to be able to say Name: libsnmp ... %package mibs Summary: MIB files for libsnmp Architecture: noarch thus the code would get i386 or whatever, and the libsnmp-mibs package would be created with "noarch". Currently I see no way to do that, other than splitting the whole thing into two separate packages which happen to share a source file (libsnmp.tar.gz or whatever), which isn't really a good idea IMHO.
This feature comes up from time to time on rpm-list. Here's the current rationale for not providing the feature: The lack of the ability to have a noarch sub-package is a conscious design decision in rpm. The intent has been that the arch/os platform is unchanged throughout the processing of a spec file on a build system in order to provide a stronger guarantee that the binary packages are associated with a single source package generated on a single build host at a certain moment in time. Permitting a sub-package with "BuildArch: noarch" weakens this guarantee because there would be a set of generated noarch packages, one from each of the build platforms, all with the same name, some of which may not "work" (consider packaging something like X11 fonts in a noarch package that might have byte-order dependencies in older formats) dependent on which build host was used to produce the noarch package.
Gonna close this, as I can't change the behavior.