RPMbuild mystery parameters "--with" and "--without"

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 03:24:12PM +0100, Björn Persson wrote:
> Apparently RPMbuild has a pair of parameters "--with" and "--without"
> that can supposedly enable and disable optional features in a package.
> Has anyone seen any documentation that explains how those work and how
> they interact with a spec file?
> 
> I want to be able to easily switch an option between these two states:
> · off by default but can be enabled with "--with"
> · on by default but can be disabled with "--without"
> What's a good way to code that in the spec?

They are (IMHO) very confusing to implement.  However have a look at a
the libvirt spec file for a working example:

  http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/libvirt.git/tree/libvirt.spec

Also there's a bug open to make these flags work from 'fedpkg local':

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=820596

> According to the Packaging Guidelines we're not supposed to use those
> parameters when building "the source RPM to be submitted", because they
> somehow get "serialized" into the source package. I don't understand
> this, because I don't submit any source packages.

Yeah I don't understand this either.  I didn't know it was possible to
submit an SRPM directly (except for scratch builds), and if there is
it doesn't sound desirable.

> The source package gets built on a Koji server when I run "fedpkg
> build", and I don't know of a way to pass any options to that
> process.

There isn't .. and shouldn't be, since you'd want 'fedpkg build' to
build exactly one RPM variant.

However for 'fedpkg local' these flags could be pretty useful, see
above.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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