Not evil, perhaps, but not trivial.

I'm trying to build the rpms for the latest courier release version, on a SUSE 7.2 system, following all the instructions I have managed to track down so far...

I need to modify the install directories by editing the spec file because, for example, the apache home directory is actually at /usr/local/httpd

Then I start to hit problems - the faq doesn't make clear exactly how you "use that spec file to build your RPMs" - I have successfully overwritten my changes now several times. Should I be using the -ta option to rpm, or -tb, or something else? Oh - and there was a message on the mailing list suggests using ~ in the .rpmmacros file; this doesn't work too well (on SuSE at least) - you need to use either $HOME, or hard-code the value. Otherwise you see odd messages about inability to copy locale files to courier.spec, which is obviously nonsense.

Second, if I try and build the RPMs as non-root, I can't actually complete the process because /sbin/chkconfig is in the sbin directory, and ordinary users don't have access to that directory, which is reasonable, since stuff goes in the sbin directory, rather than bin, for a reason.

So; if building RPMs is the recommended way to install courier, but anyone not building for RedHat will have to use a custom .spec file in addition to xflags, could the FAQ (or even INSTALL) be updated with simple instructions on how to do this, instructions that actually work?