Can I use rpm to expand the macros in a specfile?
Solution 1
You could grep to get the Source lines, sed to extract the string containing the macro and then rpm --eval 'string' to evaluate it. Note that this will only expand the global macros, not the ones defined in this spec.
To expand those as well you'd probably need to grep for them and feed them to rpm as your custom macros file.
Solution 2
Since rpm 4.9 you can use:
rpmspec -P <spec_file>
This will print out expanded spec file on stdout
Solution 3
If its only the source lines you need parsed, spectool
will do that for you. It's part of Fedora's rpmdevtools.
$ spectool ./mg.spec
Source0: http://homepage.boetes.org/software/mg/mg-20110120.tar.gz
$
Here's its help screen
Usage: spectool [<options>] <specfile>
Options:
operating mode:
-l, --lf, --list-files lists the expanded sources/patches (default)
-g, --gf, --get-files gets the sources/patches that are listed with
a URL
-h, --help display this help screen
files on which to operate:
-A, --all all files, sources and patches (default)
-S, --sources all sources
-P, --patches all patches
-s, --source x[,y[,...]] specified sources
-p, --patch a[,b[,...]] specified patches
misc:
-d, --define 'macro value' defines RPM macro 'macro' to be 'value'
-C, --directory dir download into specified directory (default '.')
-R, --sourcedir download into rpm's %{_sourcedir}
-n, --dryrun, --dry-run don't download anything, just show what would be
done
-D, --debug output debug info, don't clean up when done
Solution 4
If you look at the /usr/bin/spectool
script in rpmdevtools that @mmckinst talks about, you'll see it's just an elaborate hack. It creates a tmp spec file that essentially does what script below does. This is what we're using to expand the spec file and then grep for the parts of the file we need. In our case, we wanted more than the sources and patches.
Here's a sample bash script that simulates this behavior. It will expand all macros up through the %prep
section.
#!/bin/bash
spec_file="$1" # pass in the path to the spec file as the first argument
tmp_spec="/tmp/eval-$$.spec"
cat "$spec_file" | sed '/^%prep/,$d' > "$tmp_spec"
echo '%prep' >> "$tmp_spec"
echo 'cat<<__EOF__' >> $tmp_spec
cat "$spec_file" | sed '/^%prep/,$d' >> "$tmp_spec"
echo '__EOF__' >> "$tmp_spec"
rpmbuild -bp "$tmp_spec" 2>/dev/null
rm -f "$tmp_spec"
Solution 5
Expand macros in scripts
If you're interested in what the scripts in your RPM look like after macro expansion, you can just build the RPM and then get RPM to extract the scripts:
rpmbuild -bi my-package.spec
rpm -qp --scripts my-package.rpm
This works because RPM expands the macros at build-time.
user376403
Updated on June 17, 2022Comments
-
user376403 over 1 year
The concrete example being I have lots of specfiles with
Source0
: or otherSource
lines containing macros. How can I have these macros expanded without actually starting a build on the specfile or writing my own parser? -
Guss about 12 yearsThis would be awesome, if only it would be available in current enterprise distributions (RHEL/CentOS).
-
Guss about 12 yearsThis is the recommended option to extract and evaluate source files for most RPM based distribution.
-
Taylor Buchanan almost 12 yearsIndeed this is a better way to handle SourceX lines then my solution (which is more generic on the other hand)
-
Piotr Lesnicki about 11 yearsThis is indeed a useful workaround when
spectool
is not available on your machine. -
drahnr about 11 yearsrpm 4.10.1- this fails and requires the sources to be downloaded ahead, which renders it pretty useless. Can anyone confirm that (rule out a borked setup).
-
drahnr about 11 yearsUsually the urls contain at leas
%{version}
which does not get expanded (rpm 4.10.1) -
Craig Ringer about 9 yearsThis is actively wrong: wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Packaging_guidelines/ParsingSpecFiles
-
jayhendren over 8 yearsTo clarify @Guss's comment,
rpmspec
is available on RHEL/CentOS 7 but not on RHEL/CentOS 6 or earlier. -
Alan Franzoni over 8 yearsI tried the script without success (it returned an exit code of 0 without printing anything); I think it's interesting but the "--nodeps" option should be added to rpmbuild (otherwise an unsatisfied BuildRequires will prevent rpmbuild from working), and an explicit message and exit code should be propagated in the event rpmbuild fails. I'm proposing an edit to the post with such changes.