Topic: NEWBIE "NOARCH"

[Tim Jabaut]

Sorry to ask a NEWBIE question, but what does the NOARCH stand for in many of the updated RPM's

[Lloyd keen]

Its an RPM that is not architecture dependant.  The same RPM is used on
alpha, i386, sparc, ppc, etc.  Usually man pages, text documents, and
non-binary things like that.

[Gordon Rowell]

Lloyd keen wrote:
>
> Its an RPM that is not architecture dependant.  The same RPM
> is used on alpha, i386, sparc, ppc, etc.  Usually man pages,
> text documents, and non-binary things like that.

And in the case of e-smith, this is most of our packages, since they are predominantly Perl scripts.

Compare, for example, kernel-2.2.16-22.i686.rpm with e-smith-base-4.4.0-13.noarch.rpm - the first is an i686 specific binary package, whereas the second is architecture neutral.

And to complete the picture, i386.rpm files are o.k. for i386 processors and above (i386, i486, i586, Pentium, etc.), whereas i586/i686 are only for the later processors.

Gordon

[Tim Jabaut]

Thanks for the clarification