during a chroot, cwd stays outside of the chroot generally. Normally you
following a chroot by a cd "/" or similar to force the programs to move into the
chroot. I'm not sure if RPM 4 does that or not. (Based on this it seems like
it is not. This is done BTW so that you can escape the chroot
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=503195#c13
as I said:
if, from the python bindings, I open a file with a name starting with '/'
while in a transaction then as expected, the file is opened inside the
installroot
however, if I open a file with a name NOT starting with '/' then the
