A small update here:
a) Upstream rpm has capability support now (both for packaging and verifying), and likely to be included in RHEL 6
b) Upstream rpm now filters out the bogus timestamp differences on verification: as files which differ only by timestamp aren't treated as conflicts, it makes no sense to have verification whine about them either. No reason why this wouldn't make it to RHEL 6. This makes verification output reasonably meaningful on multilib systems again.
FWIW, b) can trivially be backported to RHEL 4+5 too.
A small update here:
a) Upstream rpm has capability support now (both for packaging and verifying), and likely to be included in RHEL 6
b) Upstream rpm now filters out the bogus timestamp differences on verification: as files which differ only by timestamp aren't treated as conflicts, it makes no sense to have verification whine about them either. No reason why this wouldn't make it to RHEL 6. This makes verification output reasonably meaningful on multilib systems again.
FWIW, b) can trivially be backported to RHEL 4+5 too.