good post, only one thing. You dont need (read: should not) run as root. There really are no necessary reason for running rpmbuild as root, the %defatr section defines the default permissions (in your example user:root and group:root) you can, and should also set permission in the %files section as needed per folder/file, and in some cases the default %defattr root:root will result in eg configuration files not being readable by normal user (nemo) As rpmbuild builds in ~/rpmbuild directory tree it is able to create the rpm as user nemo etc.