[Mageia-dev] Importing RPM Spec File Syntax

Mon Jan 17 23:07:04 CET 2011

'Twas brillig, and Florian Hubold at 17/01/11 21:53 did gyre and gimble:
+> Am 15.01.2011 11:08, schrieb Remy CLOUARD:
+>> http://mageia.org/wiki/doku.php?id=spec_syntax
+>>
+>> Please review this page as it’s one of the most important one for the
+>> beginning of the mentoring process, with the RPM Howto page (yet to be
+>> imported).
+> 
+> I have one comment, or more of a question: Why is it that some time ago
+> there used to be this syntax as de-facto standard:
+> 
+> %define name
+> Name: %name
+> 
+> Never understood this, so i went with what seems the new standard,
+> which saves you at least 3 lines per spec and improving readability.
+> 
+> So anyone can enlighten me why name, release and version had %defines?
+
+I think the general reason was that you quite often want to use %name in
+other places too. e.g. Obsoletes: %name-redundant-old-subpackage
+
+Ditto for %version.
+
+While you can use these without %defining them (just by virtue of them
+being the Name: or Version: etc., I think it's more declarative and
+deterministic to define them.
+
+There could be other reasons too (e.g. update scripts?) and also just to
+keep the critical things right at the top of the file for easy access.
+
+Other than that I can't think of any reasons.
+
+Col
+
+
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+mageia(at)colin.guthr.ie
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
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