Comment 6 for bug 651522

The problem reporter described is a bug which needs to be addressed in RHEL5. The general solution is to allow a rpmbuild user to prevent application of hunks into wrong contexts. This can be done by decreasing the fuzz factor for the patch(1) utility. Then patch(1) fails so rpmbuild fails as well. This bugfix is currently present in current packages added to erratum (backported from upstream).

The addition of the -s option by rpm by default is not actually a culprit of the wrong behaviour. It is just a consequence of the fact that patch(1) applies hunks with non-zero offsets and makes backups by default. -s option just causes patch(1) not to be verbose about that. Removing the -s option will cause patch(1) to output warnings but doesn't stop rpmbuild. So it is likely that the .orig files are mistakenly packaged. This will never happen if patch fuzz is set to 0.

Adding a custom options to patch(1) calls from rpmbuild is a RFE and it is actually implemented upstream (#471006). It is not a very good idea IMO to have this RFE backported to RHEL5 because we should keep the rpm patch set as minimal as possible so that it is considerably maintainable. But reported should feel free to file a new bug for this purpose so it is reconsidered in the following updates.

Note to QA:
A test for this bug is to make rpmbuild fail in "rpmbuild -bp foo.spec" where foo.spec contains patch that is not cleanly applicable. You can use rpm package itself for this purpose, as described in comment #6.