For my sins, I am one of those people who doesn't always read Python'sfine documentation carefully enough. For example, I wrote a large chunkof code using the helpful os.path.join() before I noticed a littlegotcha: it's very helpful. In particular:

Joins one or more path components intelligently. If any component isan absolute path, all previous components are thrown away, andjoining continues .

(Right there in black and white in the fine documentation .)

There's three ways to build RPMs: the silly way, the easy way, andthe better way.

The silly way starts with /bin/su root , which should be enough of a warning sign. You really don't wantto be building and installing packages as root unless you don't have achoice, and you do.

The easy way is:

$ cat >$HOME/.rpmmacros
%_topdir /some/where
^D
$ cd /some/where
$ mkdir BUILD