Although RPM was originally designed to work with RedHat Linux, it also works on other rpm-based distributions: Mandrake Linux, Suse, Caldera, etc ; rpm is already installed on these systems.
You can get the vanilla rpm distribution from RedHat here: ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/rpm/dist/
The binary rpm you will build for Mandrake Linux may not work across the distributions, although Mandrake makes everything possible to stay compatible with Red Hat.
Building packages for Cooker (e.g. the development version of Mandrake Linux) is always submitted to small patches and enhancements on the rpm program in use. Open any Mandrake-Cooker mirror and get:
The package rpm which is our patched version of RedHat's.
The package rpm-build which holds scripts used to build packages.
The package spec-helper which is a tool to minimalize the specfiles by doing automatic things such as stripping the binaries and compressing the man pages.
The package libtool which is used by some configure scripts to build shared libraries.