Bug 547997

Summary: rpmbuild -bs became more strict and chokes on undefined macros in Requires
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Jens Petersen <petersen>
Component: rpmAssignee: Panu Matilainen <pmatilai>
Status: CLOSED RAWHIDE QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: rawhideCC: ffesti, haskell-devel, jnovy, pmatilai, rdieter
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2009-12-17 07:20:11 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Jens Petersen 2009-12-16 10:13:50 UTC 
Description of problem:
I can understand on BuildRequires but rpm now seems to need
to be able to expand macros in Requires to build srpms?

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
4.8.0-0.beta1.3

How reproducible:
every time

Steps to Reproduce:
1. use macro like %ghc_version not defined in rpm or redhat-rpm-config (base)
   in package .spec file
2. try to build in dist-f13 in koji
3. job fails while generating srpm

Actual results:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1874770

Expected results:
Be allowed like in dist-f12?

Additional info:
We need ghc macros in rpm or redhat-rpm-config like we have for ocaml.
See ghc-rpm-macros package for %ghc_version and more.

Without fixing this we can't build ghc library packages for rawhide
and ghc-6.12.1 was just released so we need to rebuild them all.
Comment 1 Rex Dieter 2009-12-16 14:03:55 UTC 
Fwiw, a workaround is easy enough.  For any undefined macro, say, %{foo}, change:
Requires: %{foo}
to
%{?foo:Requires: %{foo}}

This technique can be applied to BuildRequires as well.
Comment 2 Jens Petersen 2009-12-17 01:29:54 UTC 
(In reply to comment #1)
> Requires: %{foo}
> to
> %{?foo:Requires: %{foo}}

Thanks Rex that helps a lot actually. :)
It has given me enough ideas to experiment a bit
- perhaps after that I may be able to close this actually.
Comment 3 Panu Matilainen 2009-12-17 07:20:11 UTC 
Yup, this is one of the fundamental chicken-and-egg problems with spec files: there's no guarantee that a spec can be correctly parsed if build-requires are missing, but in order to parse out build-requires from the spec, rpmbuild needs to be able to parse the entire spec...

Generally, if there's a chance for a macro to be undefined, the spec should be written to deal with it somehow. The approach shown by Rex works fine for Requires and many others, but with BuildRequires it can cause the BuildRequire that would correct the situation to be missed. Another variant that avoids that would be
BuildRequires: ghc %{?ghc_version:= %{ghc_version}}

Anyway, I've loosened up the new checks to permit unexpanded macros to slip through the valid character checks until we have a better fix for this. Built into 4.8.0-0.beta1.4 in rawhide now.
Comment 4 Jens Petersen 2009-12-18 10:12:41 UTC 
Ah thanks that saves we having to write extra ghc macros for now then. :)

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=147621