how to prevent creation of empty %{name}-%{version}-build directory when running rpmbuild -bs

[decathorpe]

I noticed after upgrading to Fedora 41 that very common operations like rpmbuild -bs or fedpkg srpm (which calls rpmbuild -bs under the hood) now create an empty directory of the form %{name}-%{version}-build. It looks like this is part of the "hermetic build directory" stuff that was implemented in RPM 4.20.

Why does this directory get created when just assembling an SRPM too? It just creates a lot of clutter (empty directories everywhere), and messes up shell completion for tools like mock.

I grepped through /usr/lib/rpm/ but I can't find any way to override this behaviour with a macro that I could set in my ~/.rpmmacros file. Can it be turned off somehow? Or should it be disabled for the rpmbuild -bs operation? It doesn't seem useful at all there.

[pmatilai]

Most likely that's just an oversight, aka a bug.

[pmatilai]

Filed as #3382

[decathorpe]

Thanks! I wasn't able to tell whether it's an intentional change or not, so I filed a discussion instead of a bug. :)