description and summary not updated for firefox rpm unless renamed

[Panu Matilainen]

On 08/08/2011 06:45 PM, Daniel Neuberger wrote:
> All,
>
> I'm finding a really strange bug with a firefox RPM I'm building. As
> long as the name tag is firefox, I can't change the summary or the
> description or the resulting RPM. It always ends up being:
>
> Summary : Mozilla Firefox Web browser.
> Description :
> Mozilla Firefox is an open-source web browser, designed for standards
> compliance, performance and portability.
>
> If I change the name tag to "firefox2" for instance, everything works as
> normal.
>
> Ideas?

You have 'specspo' package installed and are running some older distro 
(such as RHEL <= 5). 'specspo' provides translations for package group, 
summary and description strings.

When the specspo mechanism is enabled, rpm tries to look up a 
translations to ALL languages from specspo, and only falls back to the 
actual string from the package itself if it doesn't exist in specspo. 
This lookup is keyed on name(item) (in this case "firefox(description)") 
instead of the actual string in the original package to allow changing 
the original (english) description without breaking all its 
translations. What you're seeing is the downside: even the english 
"translation" comes from specspo if available for that package. You're 
not the first and almost certainly not the last to wonder about this :)

If you dont care about those translations, just 'rpm -e specspo' and 
you'll see the relevant strings including description as they are in the 
package instead of the translation "database".

	- Panu -