The beauty of source RPMs is that they contain everything needed to build binary RPMs. If you follow the setup as described in the original post and install the source RPM like so:
rpm -ivh $RPM -where $RPM is the name/location of the source RPM you like to install- then the contents of the source RPM will be installed in your
%_topdir.
Again, I refer you to http://www.rpm.org/ to learn about using/creating RPMs. The topic is too fast to be explained here. In a nutshell though, each source RPM consists of a tarball of the original source code and a spec file with instructions how to compile the source code and where to install the resulting binaries. The RPM package manager does the rest. It will bundle the binaries into a new binary RPM along with dependecy requirements.
To get started I recommend you install the http://www.thecodemill.biz/repository/aolserver-4.0.10-2.src.rpm and inspect the aolserver.spec file while you read all there is to know about RPMs at http://www.rpm.org/.
For now the procedure to maintain these RPMs is to email me patches to their spec file. Once there are several developers actively involved we can think about different ways of organizing maintenance.
I'll be touching on these topics during Fri's Boston OpenACS meeting.
