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Say, I have a certain program that I need to convert to an RPM package. The source is not available to me, for various reasons.
However, it seems that RPM packages cannot be made if one doesn't have the source (unlike other packages, especially Debian packages, which can even be constructed without dpkg-deb, by using the standard Linux tools).
Is there some way I could make the package?
You can use the usual procedure to build an rpm package, from a spec file. It doesn't matter that the files you have aren't source code.
If you have (or can make) an archive that you can unpack in / in a ready-to-use form, you can use alien to convert it to an rpm.
I assume that program is currently running on the host you have access to.
You could look into repackage option used like rpm -e --repackage foo
Note that this includes -e option, that will uninstall your target software!
Last time I was looking into it, there was no in-house tool that can repack rpm without uninstalling.
...and this also looks promising, have a look : http://rpmrebuild.sourceforge.net
