Expanding RPM macros

[Peter Lemenkov]

Hello All!

One of my packages defines an essential information regarding the API
(API version string) during the %build stage. It's possible to extract
this information by invoking a binary from the %{buildroot} with
certain parameters. I'd love to add this information to the spec-file
during to Provides. Something like

Provides: %{name}_api_ver = %(%{buildroot}/bin/app --some params)

Unfortunately it seems that rpmbuild tries to expand all macros at the
very initial stage when this binary isn't available yet (not built
yet). I've tied playing with %{eval: ...} but without any luck.

Could anyone tell me if it's possible at all? And if possible how
could this be achieved?

Also I wonder why even rpmbuild -bs performs macro expansion? I
thought it should just pack spec-file and sources/patches together.

[Tom Hughes]

On 02/11/14 19:33, Peter Lemenkov wrote:
> Also I wonder why even rpmbuild -bs performs macro expansion? I
> thought it should just pack spec-file and sources/patches together.

Well the source file names often include macros like %version so it will 
have to expand macros in order to find out what source files to include 
in the archive.

Tom

[Matthew Miller]

On Sun, Nov 02, 2014 at 11:33:00PM +0400, Peter Lemenkov wrote:
> One of my packages defines an essential information regarding the API
> (API version string) during the %build stage. It's possible to extract
> this information by invoking a binary from the %{buildroot} with
> certain parameters. I'd love to add this information to the spec-file
> during to Provides. Something like
> Provides: %{name}_api_ver = %(%{buildroot}/bin/app --some params)

I think you could do this with a dependency genrator -- see
http://rpm.org/wiki/PackagerDocs/DependencyGenerator. However, this
may be a little bit abusive as the intention is to have generalized
per-language generators....