Nikolay Ulyanitsky wrote:
There are a lot of generally useful macros in Fedora, which are not
described in the Fedora wiki: %__awk, %__bzip2, %__cat, %__chgrp,
%__chmod, %__chown, %__cp, %__cpio, %__file, %__gpg, %__grep,
%__gzip, %__id, %__install, %__ln_s, %__lzma, %__xz, %__make,
%__mkdir, %__mkdir_p, %__mv, %__patch, %__perl, %__pgp, %__python,
%__rm, %__rsh, %__sed, %__ssh, %__tar, %__unzip, etc.
They're not described because they're actually not "generally useful" at
all, but completely useless. They just expand to full paths which makes no
sense because PATH exists for a reason, and sometimes not even that.
These macros are defined in /usr/lib/rpm/macros.
Mostly for historical/backwards-compatibility reasons, I guess. It also
increases compatibility with specfiles from some other distros which really
like those macros for some reason.
Some maintainers use them, some do not.
What is recommended way?
As others have already recommended: Don't use that junk. :-)
Kevin Kofler