how to show upstream changes to the user

[Ville Skyttä]

On Tuesday 27 January 2009, Panu Matilainen wrote:

> - It introduces a spec incompatibility, which can be taken care of in
>    Fedora land but not so easy for EPEL side of things. Dunno if our
>    buildsys ever does anything with the rpmbuild of the host system
>    (I seem to recall it doing some part there but could easily be wrong),
>    IF so this is pretty much a no-go.

I suppose this has been asked/suggested before, but how about changing rpm so 
that its spec file parser doesn't error out but rather issues a big warning 
when it sees a tag like structure it doesn't understand, and ignores it?  And 
add a command line option like --lenient to rpmbuild that enables this 
behavior (default would be "strict" like currently).  After this option has 
trickled to all supported environments, every use of a newly added tag would 
no longer render the package unbuildable with earlier rpmbuild versions.