[Fedora-packaging] When to use a leading underscore?

[indent man]

Or maybe for historical reasons ?
http://www.rpm.org/wiki/PackagerDocs/Macros#ConfigurationusingMacros

If you find the right answer, please let me know, I'm interested too.


On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 10:47 AM, indent man <indentman at gmail.com> wrote:

> You can take a look at top comment in /usr/lib/rpm/macros
> Not sure what it means, however :)
>
> Cheers
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 11:33 PM, Björn Persson <
> bjorn at xn--rombobjrn-67a.se> wrote:
>
>> As maintainer of fedora-gnat-project-common I sometimes work on RPM
>> macros for
>> use in Ada packages. Every time I define a new macro I have trouble
>> deciding
>> whether its name should begin with an underscore or not. I know that
>> there is
>> some technical difference but I've never quite understood what practical
>> difference it makes.
>>
>> I've been trying to imitate macros with a similar function, so I defined
>> _GNAT_project_dir with a leading underscore in analogy with _libdir and
>> others. Macros containing command line flags for build tools I've defined
>> without a leading underscore in analogy with optflags, but then there are
>> _smp_mflags and the hardening macros which have the underscore, and
>> __global_cflags and __global_ldflags even have two leading underscores.
>>
>> Could someone explain what difference a leading underscore makes and give
>> some
>> guidance on when I should use it?
>>
>> Is a double leading underscore functionally different from a single one,
>> or is
>> that just some kind of naming convention?
>>
>> Björn Persson
>>
>> --
>> packaging mailing list
>> packaging at lists.fedoraproject.org
>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/packaging
>
>
>
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