mkinitrd and 2.4.x annoyances

While trying to upgrade a redhat 6.2 I've come across the following annoyance.

Changes states that you need mkinitrd 2.9 or better. No problem. Go to redhat
site and grab source rpm. In my case 3.0.5 was the one available. Build and
install the package. Run it. Curse. Turns out that mkinitrd relies on mktemp
accepting the -d which under 6.2 isn't the case. And remakeing mktemp isn't
an option as I'm not about to upgrade to glibc 2.2 just for that. It was an
easy enough fix to patch mkinitrd to not rely on the -d flag but still bloody
annoying. I can see why they use mktemp -d as they do all the work in the /tmp
dir so want to avoid potential races in creating the temp directories but why
use /tmp at all? It's possible to do everything in the current working, No?