Hi everyone,
RPM has deprecated the %patchN syntax in favor of %patch -PN where N is the patch number for a year now. See the RPM documentation for more information [1]. In current RPM versions, this syntax only emits a deprecation warning, but support for this syntax has been removed completely in the upcoming RPM 4.20 release. As it will be added in Fedora soon [2] it is time to switch over to the new syntax now.
There are around 1800 packages that still use the old syntax. Later this week/next week, we will run this script [3] over the affected packages [4][5] to update them to the modern patch syntax. For example, the script will change:
%patch0 -p1 → %patch -P0 -p1 %patch0005 -p2 → %patch -P0005 -p2
If anyone has any objections or would like to exclude a package, please let me know.
As this change does not affect the resulting binary packages an immediate rebuild is not needed. The change will "only" ensure the packages still build with the new version of RPM.
This is the change with the highest compatibility (back to RPM 3.x). There are more modern options (like %autosetup) that packagers are encouraged to use but are out of scope here.
Florian
[1] https://rpm-software-management.github.io/rpm/manual/spec.html#patch-1 [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RPM-4.20 [3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/File:User-Ffesti-new_patch_syntax.sh [4] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/File:User-Ffesti-patchNN-packages.txt [5] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/File:User-Ffesti-patchNN-package-owners.txt