Thanks so much Thomas...This indeed works now with the double quotes. However I am still getting one error message (or rather warning message) as shown below. The good news is it is not stopping me from activating the repository role. The error message is still showing up after the role is activated, but i can see the access to the Root Package is granted as expected.
Hope I can ignore the error message and it will not create any issue when I transport my repository design time role into QA & Prod systems.
mismatched input '".REPO_PACKAGE_ROOT"' expecting RULE_ID