In the past I've always accomplished RPM on Windows using cygwin. 
Cygwin gets you the Unix-Like environment that RPM requires.

There are some gotchas, as listed in Jeff's message.  Symlinks and 
hardlinks.. as well as max path/filenames length are the biggests.

--Mark

Jeff Johnson wrote:
> First and foremost:
> 
>       The rpmbuild parser is allergic to "\r" line termination.
> 
> You will see some extremely bizzarre problems if you run rpmbuild
> on a spec file polluted with \r termination.
> 
> The problem has needed fixing for years, just, well, windows and linux
> don't really coexist happily because of ideology, and so noone has 
> bothered.
> 
> On Feb 1, 2008, at 8:22 AM, Peter Kalbus wrote:
> 
>> We want to use rpm5.x in an embedded environment. The development is a 
>> cross-platform environment hosted on win32 systems. To get rpm 5.x 
>> usable, we need rpm5.x running in that environment.
>>
>> On the win32 host, it must be possible to create packages, which can 
>> be installed on the embedded systems and which can be installed on 
>> other development systems. This means,that the rmpbuild and rpm 
>> toolchain, including the database parts must be available on the win32 
>> host system.
>>
>> In which way rpm5.x is capable be be used on win32 systems? Ideally, 
>> we're interested in a native port, which does not force the 
>> installation of any un*x runtime environment.
>>
> 
> The majority of the code base of rpm likely ports to Win32 (and any 
> POSIX system)
> without too much pain.
> 
> Equivalently, where you find major porting pain, the functionality is 
> likely not critical to rpm
> functionality.
> 
> (but perhaps I'm an optimist)
> 
> The design of rpm likely has some major problems however. There's lots of
> uglix culture buried in cp vs copy, file paths without C: and '//' UNC 
> conventions, etc
>  that would need to be addressed in a native port.
> 
> Adding items to a registry would need to be added somehow for native *.rpm
> installations too.
> 
> Installing a unix runtime is the typical approach. I can't recall anyone 
> ever
> attempting building rpm natively.
> 
> 73 de Jeff
> ______________________________________________________________________
> RPM Package Manager                                    http://rpm5.org
> User Communication List                             rpm-users@rpm5.org