[Fedora-packaging] Are brackets around macros required?

[Mario Blättermann]

Am 15.08.2011 19:12, schrieb Rex Dieter:
> On 08/15/2011 12:02 PM, Göran Uddeborg wrote:
>> In a package review recently I was asked to put brackets around all
>> macro usages.  That is, writing
>>    %{name}.desktop
>> rather than
>>    %name.desktop
> 
> imho, using brackets is near-universally safer, but I doubt we need to 
> mandate it.  If anyone's non-use of brackets ever does break anything, 
> that's their responsibility to fix I suppose.
> 
I'm the package reviewer who has critizized the missing brackets [1].

First, it is usual in almost all packages to use them. However, that's
not reason enough to make them mandatory. Actually, I wrote about the
readability. I'm using Gedit for writing and viewing the spec files,
which uses gtksourceview for syntax highlighting. Gedit doesn't
recognize any macros without brackets and doesn't highlight them. That's
my experience regarding the readability, and I would strongly recommend
to use the brackets. Either mandatory, or as a fully-or-nowhere choice,
means, either always in a certain spec file, or nowhere.

Best Regards,
Mario

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=730426