using checkinstall

Compiling checkinstall for Fedora 13 is tricky, and described in this tip. Also on that page are the edits required to get it to work under RHEL6 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6).

It seems that checkinstall adds the directories /selinux and /selinux/context to the package it builds. This leads to an error like "error: unpacking of archive failed on file /selinux/context" when installing from the RPM (for example) it has created.

You can avoid this by running checkinstall as follows:
checkinstall --exclude=/selinux,/selinux/context
Alternatively (if you have an RPM file with those files already in it), you can run rpm as follows:
rpm -ivh <rpm filename> --excludepath /selinux

Side note: to have checkinstall create an RPM, and answer "yes" to all questions (so it won't prompt you for anything), add the options -R and -y:
checkinstall -R -y --exclude=/selinux,/selinux/context