Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 441473
Check BuildRequires before warning of unknown tags
Last modified: 2008-10-02 06:05:15 EDT
When running 'rpmbuild -ba some.spec', if the spec file contains a tag that rpm doesn't know about, you get an error error: line 1: Unknown tag: %whatever These errors should be reported, and they should stop the spec file from building, but it would be useful for rpm to continue reading the spec file and report missing BuildRequires at least. Why is this useful? Sometimes third-party source packages have particular tags that are defined in an 'rpm-config' package you need to install first. But at the moment there is no way to use BuildRequires to say that the config package must be loaded. Instead rpmbuild gives the unknown tag error first, stops processing the file, and never gets as far as BuildRequires. The more user-friendly output would be something like error: line 1: Unknown tag: %whatever error: Failed build dependencies: whatever-rpm-config is needed by some.fc8.noarch
I see your point, but consider the following, perfectly valid macro definition in whatever-rpm-config: %whatever BuildRequires: whatever-rpm-config At which point any attempt to continue parsing would be completely moot. This simply can't be done reliably at all, so there's not much point in even trying.