[Rpm-maint] macrofiles: ignored in rpmbuild 4.6.0-rc1

[Joachim Worringen]

Greetings,

we are using a pretty complex script + spec files to build RPMs from our 
software stack.

This operation works well on a wide range of distributions (all we 
know), but now fails with rpm 4.6.0-rc1 (from Fedora Core 10).

The reason is that the "macrofiles: ..." line from a rpmrc file is 
ignored, and thus _topdir and others are not set as it should: it's 
defined in a macro file placed at an arbitrary place in the file system, 
to which the macrofiles: line points.

I verified that defining the macros in $HOME/.rpmmacros works, but we 
don't want to do this as we have customers build the RPMs themselves (to 
match their kernel), and we don't want to mess with their $HOME.

A workaround is to use --define on the rpmbuild command line, but this 
becomes pretty lenghty and clumsy because of the required quoting, and 
we'd rather put the macro definitions in a file to be sourced.

Thus, is this change a bug, or is it by design? If by design, what's the 
rationale? If it's a bug, I can provide a simple test case.

  thanks, Joachim

-- 
Joachim Worringen, Software Architect, Dolphin Interconnect Solutions
phone ++49/(0)228/324 08 17 - http://www.dolphinics.com