Using generally useful macros

[Peter Jones]

On 03/16/2010 02:32 PM, Till Maas wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 07:09:59PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> 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. :-)
> 
> The python rpmdev-newspec templates use %__python btw. I do not know,
> whether it is somehow required for the python multiple stack support,
> though.

I'm pretty sure the point of these was to support other /operating systems/,
where e.g. you might need sed from /usr/lib/ucb .

That's total hogwash, of course, and these are actually completely useless.

-- 
        Peter

Obviously, a major malfunction has occurred.
		-- Steve Nesbitt, voice of Mission Control, January 28, 1986