[ale] RPM binaries?

[JK]

Hi folks,

I'm in need of recent sources or binaries of rpm, rpmbuild
and friends.  Is it just me, or is http://rpm.org a complete
waste of space?  I got the raw source from rpm.org's
Mercurial repository, but building that source requires
Autoconf plus some other stuff that I just don't have
time to fool with at the moment.

Is there a place to get buildable source of RPM, short
of installing a recent version of Fedora?

FYI, I'm trying to build an RPM for some proprietary
software, and I want to do this in a private RPM
source tree and database, as recommended by most
recent RPM docs; rather than polluting my system
RPM DB with half-baked crap.  However, there are no
good explanations (that I can find) of how to do this
(for example, what must I put in ~/.rpmrc in order to
convince rpm and rpmbuild to use my private source
and DB trees?)

Yes, I've read the RPM guide at
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/drafts/rpm-guide-en
It was not a particularly joyful experience.

Thanks,

-- JK