On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 1:45 AM, Paul Howarth <paul@city-fan.org> wrote:
On 22/01/16 03:11, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
I'm now working on some magic macros for EPEL5.  Currently (on my
machine, at least) you can use %license and don't need BuildRoot:.  I'm
curious about some other boilerplate constructs, though.

%defattr in %files:
I've been told that even EPEL5 doesn't need this, but still it
persists.  Can someone verify that it really is not required?  Why do
people keep putting it in if so?

The need for this went away with rpm 4.4, so EL-4 needed it and EL-5 does not. It's probably still there because people can't remember whether it was EL-5 or EL-6 that removed the need for it, and left it there to be on the safe side.

And it's not helped by the fact that the version of rpmlint on EL 5 and 6 warns when it's missing.