Bug 74949

Summary:	%foo substitutions occur in .spec file comments; multiline %foo breaks out of a comment
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh>
Component:	redhat-rpm-config	Assignee:	Elliot Lee <sopwith>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	8.0	CC:	hugh
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2003-01-13 19:17:41 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 D. Hugh Redelmeier 2002-10-03 00:40:34 UTC

Description of Problem:

A spec file that has worked for years does not work on RHL8.0.
The reason appears to be that rpmbuild looks inside comments and gets confused.
In particular, the following comment in the %install section caused
the rpmbuild to fail.
# This can be different from JOVEHOME for %build's make.
If I change the ' to _, the rpmbuild succeeds!

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
rpm-build-4.1-1.06

How Reproducible:
always.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. wget -N ftp://ftp.cs.utoronto.ca/pub/hugh/jove-dev/jove4.16.0.56.tgz
2. rpmbuild -ta jove4.16.0.56.tgz

Actual Results:
fails because it treats a large part of the script as if it
were a single file name!?!  The name starts with "'s make.".
The error message is "No such file or directory".

Expected Results:
successful build (with warning about two files not being packaged)

Additional Information:
	
It is possible that the %build in the comment is part of the problem.

Comment 1 Jeff Johnson 2002-11-16 20:04:40 UTC

This WORKSFORME.

However, watchout for redhat-rpm-config,
which, if installed, may be overloading %build.

Yes %foo tokens are expanded everywhere, including comments
and within single and double quoted strings.

Comment 2 D. Hugh Redelmeier 2003-01-13 18:38:33 UTC

My problem was that %build was expanded inside a comment, and expanded to a
multi-line thing, so it "broke out" of the comment.

This is a really bad/surprising feature.  I guess I should read the
documentation.  Oh, there is none that is current.  Oh well :-)

This needs to be documented or fixed.

Comment 3 Elliot Lee 2003-01-13 19:17:41 UTC

It is as well documented as any other part of RPM (as in, not really at all).

Macros have to be expanded everywhere in order for many aspects of spec files to work, 
so this can't really be changed (rpm has no concept of comment lines at macro expansion 
time).