On Wednesday 14 January 2009 20:13:00 Matt Sealey wrote:

The one thing that is really tiring me, though, is the layout of /usr/src/packages.

As pointed out already, it is straightforward to change rpm's defaults in ~/.rpmmacros. This still only gives different per-user settings, and different packages can still step on their toes (and they will still create a big mess in the SOURCES directory). People are led to include %name in all patch names to somewhat reduce the mess, for example. When using rpm directly without a chroot, I like to keep everything in the same sub-directory instead. For building, I use the attached script. This would make much saner defaults for rpm IMO. This doesn't seem to be a popular opinion, however. Andreas