Knowledge Base (Posts about macros)

Using date in rpm macro

bgstack15 — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 12:44:25 GMT

When you are building an rpm, and you want to use the date as a variable, or macro, you might already know about the percent-parenthesis syntax.

%define use_date %(date "+%F")

What took me a long time to remember is that you have to use percent percent when you want a literal percent sign.

%define use_date %( date "+%%Y%%m%%d" )

Also, you cannot use dashes (2020-09-29) in a version of a package. Use the %%Y%%m%%d for the 20200929 format! Source: https://rpm.org/user_doc/macros.html

Rpm spec macros and variables

bgstack15 — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 12:53:36 GMT

A nice place to read about the macros in rpm specs is https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:RPMMacros. You can also run a command similar to rpm -E '%{dist}' to see a variable's definition. To use your own variable in a spec, you can use a %define.

%define myvar 3.1415926

To get even fancier, you can do shell commands in a definition.

%define version_num "%( echo %version | tr -d '\.' )"

This takes %{version} which could be 4.51 and sets a variable to "451" for which I had a use.