Bug 564613

(which is sure not to be what people want)

The macro expansion is just a text pre-processor which behaves according to its own rules (one of them is that undefined macros get passed through literally) and doesn't have a clue what context it gets called in.

If there's a chance a macro might not be defined, the spec needs to written to take that into account (use conditionals as appropriate) - that's the way it's always been. If mock re-created the src.rpm when buildrequires are installed this particular problem (which is far more general than just %descriptions) wouldn't exist but the mock developers dont want to do that...

One possibility would be moving the %_font_pkg macro into redhat-rpm-config.

Moving it in redhat-rpm-config will make it Fedora-specific and negate all the efforts that were made to keep this distro-neutral and avoid NIH rejection.

Anyway, you do not want to fix this, mock people do not want to fix this, and I didn't spend the effort I did to simplify font packaging just to see it undone step by step because tool people are unwilling to fix their problems.

So, deadlock. Except FESCO is forcing the issue now. And we all know who they feel will be safer to sacrifice so save face. However, if it comes to that, I don't have to play. I (not them) paid the price for their meddling last year. Never again. 

But I'd rather it didn't come to that and you changed your mind.

Look, I do see the problem. But "zap the macro call instead of adding it to the srpm description" is not how rpmbuild works, and I'm not adding treat-the-symptom-and-not-the-disease special-case kludgery to paper over politics.

The average use of macros in %description and the like can be easily conditionalized to avoid this issue, but %_font_pkg() is quite different as the expansion was never intended to end up in %description. As has been mentioned elsewhere (including by yourself), section end markers in spec (even if optional) would allow solving this for %_font_pkg(). And it would solve a much more generic issue, benefitting everybody. That is the kind of fix I want and have no problem with.

Support for section-end markers is unlikely to happen "yesterday already", so for an immediate "fix"... well if you dont want to move the %_font_pkg macro to redhat-rpm-config, another possibility is to stick a dummy in there that expands to %{nil} when fontpackages-devel is not installed.

Sorry I was not clear. I don't want this problem solved by kludges either. So far we've all been discussing kludges (moving the macro call, moving the macro in another package, making it conditional, etc)

If you feel the correct long-term solution rpm-side is section end markers I am 200% in agreement with you.

I have no objection to the dummy either as it won't require changes in existing packages, won't block use in other distributions, and can be removed easily when it's no longer useful.

I apologize for burdening you with my problems, there was no one else interested in discussing long term solutions.

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 13 development cycle.
Changing version to '13'.

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This package has changed ownership in the Fedora Package Database.  Reassigning to the new owner of this component.

This package has changed ownership in the Fedora Package Database.  Reassigning to the new owner of this component.

Optional end markers added upstream [1]. I don't plan to push this feature into current fedora, it will get to fedora with new release of rpm. So closing as upstream. 

[1] https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/commit/16c658f1833f5cf9f244cb9f3465587e3bce2491

And that has finally hit Fedora so I can make use of it in Fedora macros now

Thank you very much