t'goosh!

aside from avoiding building rpms as root, using .rpmmacros will (and i mean WILL) help you save time and effort. how? say you put in your .rpmmacros

%_topdir /home/user/devt/rpm

then you suddenly decided to upgrade your build machine. intuition tells you to back up your home directory. if you're didn't use .rpmmacros, you still have to backup /usr/src/redhat/ to save your build directory (oh, my precious spec files!!). ahh... the things we have to learn the hard way...