On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 12:58:13PM -0400, James B. Byrne alleged:
Karanbir Singh wrote:
To find out exactly what is going on, look at the bit which creates the .files that are then used in the %files section to workout what which files go into what rpm. There would be an overlap there.
Given this snippet:
%files -f ruby.files ... %files devel -f ruby-devel.files
I speculate (since the rpm manual is not very helpful on the matter) that if --target= is not specified then the first file command will execute but not the third and include all of the files listed in ruby.files only whereas if --target=devel is specified to the rpmbuild command then the first and second commands will execute and include the contents of ruby.files and ruby-devel.files.
Is my understanding of this correct or in what matter is it defective?
No, --target is used to specify the target arch, eg. --target=i386 or --target=i686.
The %files sections are for creating subpackages. The first %files lists files that will be in the ruby package, the second are the files for the ruby-devel package. You'll see corresponding %package, and possibly %post, %pre, etc. section.