I’d found mock from a post on the scons-users list (I think… yesterday was long ago and my memory is poor), and wanted to try it out, but alas it uses the rpm python bindings, which don’t exist on Debian… or they do but they don’t exist here… anyway, I gave up.
But today I was looking to see if I could find a Debian package of the python rpm bindings, because I really want to build rpms in chroot on my Ubuntu workstation, and I found this brilliant hack on Progeny’s lsb-workers list.