To make rpms as a regular (non-root) users,
you need to have the rpm program installed
on your system (of course). If you run
"rpm --help" and get a lot of text back,
you have rpm :)

To create a local rpm directory for creating
rpm releases, you may copy the sample 
rpmmacros file in the build/rpm directory
to your home directory as .rpmmacros, like so:

$ cp build/rpm/rpmmacros_sample ~/.rpmmacros

The settings in that rpmmacros file work in
a directory ~/myrm, so you must create
that directory, and a subdirectory for
lifelines files:

$ mkdir ~/myrpm
$ mkdir ~/myrpm/lifelines

Now you are ready to create an rpm release.
This is a two step operation

=========
#1) Copy the distribution tarball to the
lifelines rpm directory:

$ cp bld/lifelines*.tar.gz ~/myrpm/lifelines

=========
#2) Create the rpms

$ cd build/rpm
$ rpmbuild -ba lifelines.spec

or on older systems,

$ cd build/rpm
$ rpm -ba lifelines.spec