Never wrote RPM specs because I generally dislike RPM-based distributions (Fedora was a really bad experience when I tried it), but from a quick Google search they’re very similar.

I kinda like the format at a glance, seems pretty comparable in terms of what you put in there. Definitely less painful than debhelper.

I guess one of the advantages of PKGBUILD is that they’re essentially bash scripts that gets sourced by the tools, so they’re incredibly simple and don’t require parsing a custom format. You can:

#!/bin/sh
source PKGBUILD
prepare
build
check
package

That comes with disadvantages in that reading the PKGBUILD is inherently unsafe, and it was the cause of many concerns back in the days with tools like yaourt, which pretty much just blindly sourced it to get the variables out, which means immediate code execution just loading it from the AUR.

I’ve either never dealt with RPM specs before or it’s been so long that I can’t remember. Therefore, I can only make a statement about PKBUILD files.

Such files are relatively easy to create and read, as they are basically shell scripts. Thus, if you use AUR, for example, you can easily check them before an installation or an update to see whether the creator has done everything correctly or whether he has changed the file with malicious intent.

For example, a typical PKBUILD file looks like this.

# Maintainer: Alad Wenter <https://github.com/AladW>
# Co-Maintainer: Cedric Girard <cgirard [dot] archlinux [at] valinor [dot] fr>
pkgname=aurutils
pkgver=17.2
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc='helper tools for the arch user repository'
url='https://github.com/AladW/aurutils'
arch=('any')
license=('custom:ISC')
source=("$pkgname-$pkgver.tar.gz::$url/archive/refs/tags/$pkgver.tar.gz")
changelog=aurutils.changelog
install=aurutils.install
sha256sums=('65efed873facf06ec73b012d94c110f35e45d3057eda2bc85983a3c8c6ce2c81')
depends=('git' 'pacutils' 'curl' 'perl' 'perl-json-xs' 'bash')
optdepends=('bash-completion: bash completion'
            'zsh: zsh completion'
            'devtools: aur-chroot'
            'vifm: default pager'
            'ninja: aur-sync ninja support'
            'bat: view-delta example script'
            'git-delta: view-delta example script'
            'python-srcinfo: sync-rebuild example script')

build() {
    cd "$pkgname-$pkgver"
    make AURUTILS_VERSION="$pkgver"
}

package() {
    cd "$pkgname-$pkgver"
    make PREFIX=/usr ETCDIR=/etc DESTDIR="$pkgdir" install
}

@veer66
One is that it’s a shell script, so it feels like there’s less to learn. The accuracy of that can be debated.

I’ve not packaged RPMs in a fair while, so I can’t make a more thorough comparison.
@linux