In a package review recently I was asked to put brackets around all macro usages. That is, writing %{name}.desktop rather than %name.desktop I personally think these superfluous brackets clutter the spec file and reduce the readability. So when they are not necessary I always omit them. To me it somewhat strange that using brackets is more common than not doing so. The situation is quite analogous to shell scripts. In (ba)sh it is always ALLOWED to have brackets around variables, but only rarely REQUIRED. Exactly as it is for macros in spec files. But while you almost never see a shell script with brackets where they are not needed, it is quite common in spec files. Should the packaging guidelines have a ruling on this? There isn't any as far as I can find. The closest I found was the choice between %{buildroot} and ${RPM_BUILD_ROOT}, and in that case the only requirement was consistency. Is consistency the only requirement in the choice between %{name} and %name too? Or is the use of %{name} with brackets actually required? -- packaging mailing list packaging@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/packaging