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badbishop
Asked: 2012-11-23 01:46:33 +0800 CST

Reference for RPM spec macros (%setup, %buildroot, etc)

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Which man page describes the usage of the top-level RPM spec file macros that are defined in RPM source files directly? I mean, %setup, %buildroot and the like, which are not in /usr/lib/rpm. Looking up the %setup options in a tutorial at rpm.org or searching through the source code isn't best of convenience.

rpm

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The Fedora Project hosts the best documentation on RPM out there in html format:

    http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora_Draft_Documentation/0.1/html-single/RPM_Guide/index.html

    See also:

    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_an_RPM_package

    Prior to these resources, my go to guide was Maximum RPM (which you also found):

    http://www.rpm.org/

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  2. Some of them are documented in Maximum RPM, Taking the RPM Package Manager to the Limit by Edward C. Bailey.

    Section Macros: Helpful Shorthand for Package Builders describes %setup and %patch macros.

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  3. There is no man page for that, but you can create a minimal spec file using rpmdev-newspec from rpmdevtools package.

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  4. As far as I am aware no such documentation exists within the man pages. Even if you review all the items available in the rpmbuild and rpm man pages it does not detail those directives.

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  5. It's crazy that there is no fundamental public reference for the .spec file format which have been heavily used by multiple distributions for more than a decade.

    You can jam a %dump into your spec and then try building (redirect stderr out to a file). Depending on where you put the %dump you get whatever macros existed at that moment. This is not a substitute for real documentation... but might keep you going.

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  6. Most of sources linked in the other answers don't seem to mention %autosetup. (At least not directly.)

    There is this "RPM Reference Manual", which does:

    https://rpm-software-management.github.io/rpm/manual/autosetup.html

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