Spec file questions

[Quentin Spencer]

I've been looking over the octave spec file (imported from core) because 
it looks like it could be cleaned up quite a bit, and I'm wondering 
about a couple of things:

1. The spec file has had for a very long time the following lines:
%build
LC_ALL=POSIX
export LC_ALL
CXXFLAGS="$RPM_OPT_FLAGS -fPIC -D_GNU_SOURCE" ./configure  
--lots-of-switches-here ...

I'm not familiar with LC_ALL, but it appears to be locale-related. 
Grepping through the source, I see the following in config.guess:
         # Set LC_ALL=C to ensure ld outputs messages in English.
        ld_supported_targets=`cd /; LC_ALL=C ld --help 2>&1 \
        ...
This doesn't appear to be defined or used anywhere else in the source 
code. Does changing the definition have any effect at all? It looks to 
me like I can safely remove it.

2. The make install section of the spec file has the following
strip $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/libexec/octave/%{version}/oct/*/*.oct

I remember hearing that RPM automatically strips executable code to form 
the "debuginfo" packages, so you don't normally have to do this. These 
files are precompiled modules that need to be stripped--is this done 
manually because RPM doesn't know that?

3. In a past review, I seem to recall someone saying that it's 
preferable to use %exclude rather than do "rm" commands in 
$RPM_BUILD_ROOT. What about doc files? Does "%exclude %doc 
path/to/files*" work?

-Quentin