In my experience, the best way to learn about how to package RPMs is to look at how other people package RPMs. That means looking at lots of spec files. Sure fedpkg will let you clone lots of package repos, but what if you only have the SRPM? You can get the spec file out of a SRPM, but it takes a little work with cpio, a tool with so many options that I can never remember the exact invocation. So I wrote a quick two-liner to save me some aggravation:

<code class="prettyprint">#! /bin/sh
spec=$(rpm -qlp $1 | grep -E '\.spec$')
rpm2cpio $1 | cpio -i --to-stdout $spec</code>

And how can you get the SRPM? Simple, install yum-utils then run

<code class="prettyprint">$ yumdownloader --source --downloadonly PACKAGE_NAME</code>