RPM actually has a poorly documented VCS
tag.
It doesn't appear to have any sort of guidelines on its use, but it exists and is supported.
cat > test.spec <<'__END__'
Name: foo
Version: 1
Summary: foo
License: None
Release: 1
VCS: git:repo=my-repo:branch=my-branch:sha=1234deadbeef
%description
foo
__END__
$ rpmspec -q test.spec --qf "%{VCS}\n"
git:repo=my-repo:branch=my-branch:sha=1234deadbeef
It appears to be limited to a single parse token. Still useful. I didn't find any documentation on a well defined format or structure for it, and its adoption is limited. On my Fedora 32 system I found two packages using it, with different formats:
$ rpm -qa --qf '%{Name} %{VCS}\n' |grep -v '(none)'
bcache-tools https://github.com/g2p/bcache-tools.git
libcue scm:git:https://github.com/lipnitsk/libcue.git
$
Frankly it's a real shame rpm doesn't give us the ability to inject custom tag info. I want to record the Jenkins build ID and job name, the git commit hash, and git branch or tag, but don't really want them in the changelog.
I can do this in debs with X-BS-foo
tags.
You can see a list of allowed rpm tags with rpm --querytags
.
The DISTURL
tag appears to be reserved for another use but could be a candidate.
There's also URL
; you could choose to embed SCM info there, and have a redirect that takes the URL to a reasonable location if visited by a browser.
You may see references to "rpm5" supporting custom tags. This seems to be a dead fork of rpm, not the rpm.org distribution used on most major distros.