diff b/w making an rpm with a spec file and doing it manually

[Tahir]

what is the difference b/w making an rpm with a specfile (specification file) and doing it manually.The reason i asked the question is this that i have been trying to generate the rpms through the spec file and not doing it manually as i didnt knew that it could be done manually after reading the how to articles i am thinking that i ve been stupid trying to generate rpm through spec file is that really so?

[daneel971]

What do you mean by "making a rpm manually"?
You can build/rebuild a rpm starting from a tarball with the source code and a specfile written from scratch, or starting from a SRPM (that is, a rpm which holds the tarball and the specfile) - usually you do this when you want to customize an existing package or to build a totally new one.
Otherwise, you can install binary rpms, that is "ready to use packages" pre-built for your system: the ones you can find in the various repos.