Comment 8 for bug 651483

The vast majority of timestamp differences comes directly from the way in which rpm operates on files shared between multiple packages, and yes it's especially bad on multilib systems like you've noticed: ELF files get their timestamps correctly as rpm completely skips the overlapping secondary arch ELF files, but for all others, the last file to come in during installation "wins". Primary arch packages are installed first to get the executables in place, which means that for everything else, the timestamps are those of the files in the secondary arch package. I had a brief look at it recently and I think it can be dealt with reasonably, and that alone solves the worst part of verify being next to useless on multilib.

As for the other verification related items:
- yes, capability support needs to be added separately
- rpm needs a sane API package+file verification, and python bindings so that yum can use that instead of rolling it's own (which at least currently misses %verifyscript functinality completely)

All of the above are on rpm upstream todo, which parts are ready in time for RHEL 6 is a different question however.