the following seems to be a correct fix for http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=27417 (ie when the last line of .spec is a macro which expands to a multi-line string) step by step patch for rpm.org HEAD: (it is easy to adapt to rpm5.org) and here is a patch doing this for rpm 4.4.2.2 (and applied in mandriva's rpm)