Increasingly I'm seeing spec file recipes (and rpmbuild) used in  
horrendously
complicated ways.

rpm spec file recipes contain "known good" (at least wrto rpmbuild  
parsing/execution)
content that results in successful builds and binary packages to be  
distributed.

That was the whole design goal behind rpmbuild's "reproducible  
builds" for OSS.

What is becoming increasingly obvious (to me if not to you) is that  
the lack
of a grammar for spec files, and the abuse of macros, is interfering  
with the
reliability of building OSS software.

Sure you can accomplish just about any goal you wish by treating  
existing spec
files as a template, and overloading existing tokens to insert  
additional goop
into a build.

But why bother using spec files for this purpose? If you want a  
paramaterized template
for builds, then why not design a format that is more reliable than  
spec files are?

There are certainly better templating candidates around than rpm spec  
files and macros,
autoconf (and m4) and make(1) and ant instantly come to mind.

Here is a rather simple popt alias for a --queryformat that starts to  
convert a specfile
into Makefile rules.

Put this in /etc/popt:
==============================================================
rpm     alias --spec:makefile --qf '\
# Display spec file scriptlets as Makefile targets \
\n# (indentation of sections not yet implemented) \
\n\
\nall:  %{NAME}.prep %{NAME}.build %{NAME}.install %{NAME}.clean\
\n\
\n.PHONY:       %{NAME}.prep\
\n%{NAME}.prep:\
\n%{Buildprep}\
\n\
\n.PHONY:       %{NAME}.build\
\n%{NAME}.build:\
\n%{Buildbuild}\
\n\
\n.PHONY:       %{NAME}.install\
\n%{NAME}.install:\
\n%{Buildinstall}\
\n\
\n.PHONY:       %{NAME}.clean\
\n%{NAME}.clean:\
\n%{Buildclean}\
\n' \
         --POPTdesc=$"display spec file scriptlets as Makefile rules"
==============================================================

(aside) Yes, I haven't attempted Makefile indentation nor filtering  
the tag content, not impossibly hard.

Then create a Makefile from any *.spec by doing

     rpm -q --spec:makefile --specsrpm foo.spec

I'm increasingly convinced (see my FOSDEM 2005 presentation abstract)  
that's its time to eliminate rpmbuild in
favor of more reliable and flexible means to produce *.rpm packages.

Other opinions?

73 de Jeff