OK, I've tried out "bdist_rpm" with RPM 2 on my Red Hat 5.2 system. I had to make "rpm_base" an option to "bdist_rpm", so now I run this:

./setup.py bdist_rpm --rpm2-mode --rpm-base=/scratch/rpmtest

because my /etc/rpmrc is this:

topdir: /scratch/rpmtest pgp_path: /home/greg/.pgp signature: pgp pgp_name: Greg Ward gward@python.net

With this change, bdist_rpm successfully launches RPM, which unpacks and builds. Things start to awry with the pseudo-installation, though: it appears that RPM 2 doesn't know about the %_tmpdir macro. I'll attach the complete output of running "bdist_rpm" on the Distutils, compressed because it's quite big (40k). (Both the Distutils and RPM are very verbose: this is a feature, dammit!)

Greg