can an RPM spec file "include" other files?

Question

Is there a kind of "include" directive in RPM spec? I couldn't find an answer by googling.

Motivation: I have a RPM spec template which the build process modifies with the version, revision and other build-specific data. This is done by sed currently. I think it would be cleaner if the spec would #include a build-specific definitions file, which would be generated by the build process, so I don't need to search and replace in the spec.

If there is no include, is there an idiomatic way to do this (quite common, I believe) task?

Answer 1

Sufficiently recent versions of rpmbuild certainly do support %include:

%include common.inc

Unfortunately, they aren't very smart about it -- there is no known set of directories, in which it will look for the requested files, for example. But it is there and variables are expanded, for example:

%include %{_topdir}/Common/common.inc

Answer 2

RPM does not support includes.

I have solved similar problems with either m4 macro processor or by just concatenating parts of spec (when the "include" was at the beginning).

If you only need to pass a few variables at build time, and not include several lines from another file, you can run

rpmbuild --define 'myvar SOMEVALUE' -bb myspec.spec

and you can use %myvar in the spec.

Answer 3

I faced this same issue recently. I wanted to define multiple sub-packages that were similar, but each varied just slightly (they were language-specific RPMs). I didn't want to repeat the same boiler-plate stuff for each sub-package.

Here's a generic version of what I did:

%define foo_spec() %{expand:%(cat '%{myloc}/main-foo.spec')}
%{foo_spec bar}
%{foo_spec baz}
%{foo_spec qux}

The use of %{expand} ensures that %(cat) is only executed a single time, when the macro is defined. The content of the main-foo.spec file is then three times, and each time %1 in the main-foo.spec file expands to each of bar, baz and qux, in turn, allowing me to treat it as a template. You could easily expand this to more than one parameter, if you have the need (I did not).