It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.
Rationale
Update guidelines to support and recommend %make_install over the expanded definition. It is slightly simpler to use and would be convenient for new packages. The expanded definition should continue to be a alternative that is mentioned in the guidelines but deprecated so that old spec files can be incrementally switched over at the discretion of the package maintainers. No flag day or mass conversion is necessary.
Using %make_install
%make_install is defined at http://rpm.org/gitweb?p=rpm.git;a=commitdiff;h=883253ea6af71f8063d7a045841c35bad22147e2 and available since RPM 4.8 introduced in Fedora 13. The current packaging guidelines use the expanded definition: make install DESTDIR=%{?buildroot} before the %make_install macro was added to upstream RPM. We should modify the packaging guidelines to suggest using the macro in place of the full definition.
Note: %makeinstall is bad and wrong and is only left in upstream RPM for compatibility. %make_install is the new and recommmended method.