On 22 Jan 2016 16:49, "Jason L Tibbitts III" <tibbs@math.uh.edu> wrote:
>
> >>>>> "PH" == Paul Howarth <paul@city-fan.org> writes:
>
> PH> does not. It's probably still there because people can't remember
> PH> whether it was EL-5 or EL-6 that removed the need for it, and left
> PH> it there to be on the safe side.
>
> That's good to know.  I also think there's more than a fair amount of
> cargo cult spec writing going on.  "I'll just copy this package that
> works.  What's this %defattr thing?  No idea, but it must be important;
> I'll just leave it there."
>
> This is why I'm spending so much time trying to clean these things up.
> Many packagers just don't understand why all of this random stuff shows
> up in a spec.  I would like for far less random stuff to ever be in a
> spec.
>
> PH> Might these affect people doing short-circuit builds? That's never
> PH> been a part of my workflow so I've not come across any issues with
> PH> it.
>
> I do not believe so, since the final spec after macro expansion is just
> a normal spec.  What's happening is really not that much different then
> what, say, the fontpackages macros do when they generate sections, or
> the way that debuginfo packages are generated now.
>
> However, if someone who actually does short-circuit builds could give me
> some things to try, I'd be more than happy to do some testing.
>

Wouldn't surprise me if it was an artifact that has carried on through the ages from before we had mock and build systems didn't get clean environments from that each build, so cleaning was a sensible thing.