Using generally useful macros

[Kevin Kofler]

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