On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 10:33:37PM +0200, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
> > Can you specify a package (from the list) which is identical on i586
> > and x86_64, but should not be made noarch because it assumes e.g.
> > little-endian architecture?
> 
> At least all packages which contain GNU message catalog files(*.mo):

It's a well-known special case: little-endian and big-endian *.mo files
can be used interchangeably (with small overhead for non-native byte
order).  Otherwise we can't put them under /usr/share in the first place!

> $ for p in `cat ~/tmp/force-noarch`; do rpm -qpl $p | grep -q
> '^/usr/share/locale/.*\.mo' && echo $p ; done

> Who knows what else.

Dmitry Levin pointed out the cpuburn package...

> > i586 and x86_64 are "different enough" except for endianness.
> > Look how they are different:
> > 1) file paths are different (lib - lib64);
> > 2) native binaries are different (elf32 - elf64);
> > 3) sizeof(void*) == sizeof(long) is different.
> >
> > How they are common:
> > 1) sizeof(int) is the same (32 bit),
> > 2) both are little endian.
> > Which means that certain host data structures (and thus certain binary
> > file formats) might have the same representation.

... which gives another "bad similarity" between the two platforms:
3) Though native binaries are different, x86_64 can execute i586 code
"almost natively", and x86_64 gcc has limited support for compiling
i586 code.