From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011011 Description of problem: suggestion: %patch macro should be able to pass more options to patch. In my pasticular case, I need to pass option --ignore-whitespace to patch. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 4.0 Steps to Reproduce: 1.rpm -bp <spec-file>
%patchN was added to rpm for 2 reasons: 1) patch-2.1 and patch-2.5 had different options 2) the N in %patchN needed to include a possibly compressed patch There's really no reason in the world why you can't apply your own patches any which way you choose. Access the full name of the patch as %{PATCHn}, substituting n as appropriate from the PatchN: directive, and use patch directly in the %prep section cat %{PATCHn} | patch <your options here> or any of a zillion other variants.