Re: Request for review: perl-Number-Compare

[Paul Howarth <paul city-fan org>]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Fri, 01 Jul 2005 10:32:00 +0100, Paul Howarth wrote:
>
>
> > - I'd put %check after %install rather than after %clean, so that builds 
> > on rpm versions not supporting %check could still work.
>
>
> Does order of spec sections matter? (I don't think so)

Current rpm versions run the %check scriptlet after %install, if %check 
is present.

Older rpm versions don't understand %check, and will barf when they come 
across it.

The standard idiom for working around this is to use:

%check || :

This causes old versions of rpm to ignore the fact that they don't 
understand %check and carry on whatever they were doing, which will be 
running the scriptlet immediately before %check. So if you want old 
versions of rpm to behave like new ones, you use this order:

%install
...
%check || :
...

If instead you have:

%install
...
%clean
...
%check || :
...

then old versions of rpm will run the %check scriptlet at the end of the 
%clean scriptlet, i.e. just after everything has been deleted. Not a 
good idea.

Paul.