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This gave me a bit of an headache ... Why on earth rpmbuild does not simply respect environment variables nor have a command line option to specify the TEMPDIR used to build the package or simply look for a simple configuration file in the local directory ? From command line you can only specify --buildroot . For everything else you must specify a global file called .rpmmacros (not .rpmrc !) and write the new defaults there. This must be either in your home, or in /etc (other other rpm specific paths). Anyway ... enough for this rant.

Imagine you want to create hdlist/sysnthesis files from a bunch of rpms on a debian system. If you know what you need it is not actually that difficult. The mandriva svn contains the tool genhdlist2. To use it on a debian machine we need to download and install two perl modules that are contained in the same directory as above, namely, perl-URPMI and MDV-Packdrakeng.