have a quick question hope someone can help me. I am building an rpm file out of a tar ball file with a user other than root who has sudo privilages. all rpm related directories have been created under the normal user $HOME directory i.e RPMS SOURCES BUILD etc. When I run the rpmbuild -ta tarball file command, it builds the rpm file fine but it places everything under the /root/rpmbuild home directory instead of the users directory. my .rpcmacros files has %_topdir /home/user/rpm

here is an example of the output at the end of the rpmbuild command:

Wrote: /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/

why is that?

Thanks for your help.

It means your package has been made in this above mentioned directory.