The only thing I might take issue with is your belief the error
message
is patently obvious.
I never said that! I said that what the error message says is true.
May I suggest the error message be replaced with something which
would
direct a developer to the root cause of the problem, especially since
this is a somewhat arcane limitation.
I'm sure the rpm maintainers would be happy to accept such a patch. Using
both actual directory names in the message rather than just "-b arg" would
probably make it clear enough.
Maybe rpmbuild should stop immediately with an error if you invoke it
with a topdir which is unacceptable to it's internal operation.
Well, it can cope in certain cases, basically when other cruft happens to
even out. So it really doesn't know for sure until it knows.
Thanks,
Roland