My question is why does this vary from rhel8/9 behaviour where redhat-release is actually built for each system architecture differently. Though I also feel that these packages should ideally be noarch as they do not install binaries but version files and certs.
Hoping if anyone has any insights into this area. Reason I ask is that there a closed source application which derives architecture from architecture information of rpm which installs the version files (eg /etc/redhat-release)
Red Hat likely has their reasons for making their packages arch-full. What that reason is is unclear. From our perspective, there isn’t a reason to have these packages to be specific per arch. There’s nothing special per arch, as far as we can tell, that a release package is going to provide. From my perspective, enforcing an arch-full package when there are no arch specific binaries or libraries being provided does not make sense.
This is, in my opinion, a fault of the software vendor. There are much, much better ways to derive the architecture of the system that doesn’t rely on a release package’s arch. I recommend reaching out to your third party vendor’s support and bringing this up to them.