Rpm rarely needs configuring. It simply works out of the box. In older versions of rpm, you could change things in /etc/rpmrc to affect run-time operation. In recent versions, that file has been moved to /usr/lib/rpm/rpmrc, and is not meant to be edited by system administrators. Mostly it just lists flags and compatibility information for various platforms (e.g. i386 is compatible with all other x86 architectures).

If you wish to configure rpm, you can do so by editing /etc/rpm/macros. Since this is rarely necessary, we'll let you read about it in the rpm bundled documentation. You can find the right documentation file with the following command:

# rpm -qld rpm | grep macros