apologies in advance as I have undoubtedly selected the wrong category and everything else for this issue.
rpm-maven-plugin documentation at http://mojo.codehaus.org/rpm-maven-plugin/params.html does not mention that the plugin supports:
<autoProvides>yes|no</autoProvides> (default yes)
<autoRequires>yes|no</autoRequires> (default yes)
The actual feature does work. It just does not appear to be documented. I had to download the source to figure out that the capability to control these properties within the spec file was supported and how to do it.
I am using rpm-maven-plugin 2,0.1 and that was the source code version I downloaded to verify that these properties are supported.
Wrong project, see http://mojo.codehaus.org/rpm-maven-plugin/issue-tracking.html