How to create an RPM from a source tarball?

[Patrick Doyle]

The one I bought was "Fedora Core 5 Unleashed" by Paul and Andrew
Hudson.  It is a 1000 page tome with a paragraph to a chapter covering
most (perhaps even all, at 1000 pages) of the major packages in FC.
It is obviously a book that was once called "Fedora Core 5 Unleashed",
and before that, "Fedora Core 3 Unleashed", etc...

I was hoping for something that covered more of the design philosophy
of Fedora, but if you want to know something about everything (in FC5,
that is), this books seems like a pretty good place to start.  It has
little tidbits, like "If you have the source code for a project and
you want to turn it into an RPM (because one doesn't already exist),
look at CheckInstall", which is what I remembered reading, but didn't
remember the punchline.

--wpd