%file questions

[Faheem Mitha <faheem email unc edu>]

Dear people,

I have been writing spec files for a few weeks now with a fair amount of
success. However, I have some pressing questions.

Chief among them is 

1) Why is it not possible to have spec -ba work with the short-circuit
option? Aargh! Ie. why can't we have an rpm built from an already
installed buildroot? Or at least skip the make part?

2) I need to install a bunch of files into the /etc directory. However,
only some of these are to be treated as config files. Now, I would like to
put

%files  ...

%config /etc/foo
/etc    ...

thus designating only foo to be a config file and having all the other etc
files be treated as `ordinary' files. However, rpm objects to files being
listed twice. What would be a good way to handle this? One possible way
would be if there was some macro that did, essentially

%files 

%config /etc/foo
/etc  except not /etc/foo

Does anyone know if this can be implemented? Any other suggestions most
welcome.

                               Best regards, Faheem Mitha.