Using rpmspec to query .spec file macros

[Panu Matilainen]

On 03/05/2015 09:44 PM, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> I'm trying to write some build automation using mock, etc. and I need to
> be able to query a .spec file for some values.  I did a "rpmspec --help"
> and tried to go by the output but it never mentions where the spec file
> goes in the arguments, for instance!
>
> I tried:
>
> target=fedora-21-x86_64
> ...
> rpmspec --target=$target *.spec --eval="%version"
>
> but this just prints "%version" as the output.  How do you query a .spec
> file for the macros it defines?

You dont, basically. It queries header tags of packages, not macros, ie 
--queryformat just like any other rpm queries.

So to query a package version from a spec, you'd use --qf "%{version}", 
not --eval. There's a gotcha involved in that by default, rpmspeq 
queries all the binary packages that would be created from the spec, 
which probably isn't what you wanted in this case:

[pmatilai at mursu popt]$ rpmspec -q --qf "%{version}\n" popt.spec
1.13
1.13
1.13
1.13
[pmatilai at mursu popt]$

Regardless of how many sub-packages there might be, there can only ever 
be exactly one source package per spec, so querying that instead helps 
in these kind of situations:

[pmatilai at mursu popt]$ rpmspec -q --srpm --qf "%{version}\n" popt.spec
1.13
[pmatilai at mursu popt]$

>
> I did a quick search for "rpmspec" "--eval" but this didn't turn up
> anything useful.
>
> Is there a tutorial on using rpmdevtools?

rpmspec is part of rpm itself, not rpmdevtools.

I'm not aware of any tutorials on it, but 
http://www.rpm.org/wiki/Docs/QueryFormat has info on general rpm query 
formatting.

	- Panu -