It seems that Red Hat fingerprints all binary files, a fact
which I found rather surprising. I've tried this on various
machines which were set up in an identical manner, and which
have the same packages. However, if I md5sum a given binary
file (say, "/usr/bin/bc"), the result will be different even
if the size and timestamp of the files are identical. Even
though the files differ, "rpm --verify" will confirm the
integrity of the files, including their md5sum. I expected
that the same package would install exactly the same binaries
on different computers but that doesn't seem to be the case
(aside from their fingerprint the binaries seem to be identical,
and work as expected). Is this behaviour documented somewhere?
Why is it done? Other non-Red Hat RPMs I've installed don't
seem to do this i.e. installing the rpm on different machines
puts identical binaries with identical md5sums on the various
systems.

Cheers

--
marco@reimeika.ca
Gunnm: Broken Angel http://v4u.reimeika.ca
http://reimeika.ca/ http://photo.reimeika.ca