On Wed, 2013-05-22 at 22:18 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
[...snip various points I agree with...]
(3) RPM's spec file format needs to be redone using a Real
Parser. At
the moment it has all sorts of strange corner cases (for example, how
to define a macro containing an arch-dependent list?). It'd be a good
opportunity to fix brokenness such as "global" meaning "define",
lack
of direct support for configuration flags, writing "0%{?rhel}",
complexity of non-trivial %setup's, etc.
Another wart: IIRC, in many cases the parse won't let you have
whitespace before "%if" in a line. This makes it more difficult to use
indentation to show hierarchical structure of nested conditionals e.g.
%if 0%{some_cond}
%if 0%{some_other_cond}
%else
%endif
%else
%endif
if you see what I mean. It would be great if the parser could cope with
this.
[...snip various other points I agree with...]
Hope this is constructive
Dave