Pat,

It would be awesome to have Koha come out as an rpm for redhat
installations.
        

We've had packages for... ask the list who did them, I can't recall who made
them.  Might've  been Steve?

  We would very much like people to produce pakages (.rpm, .deb., .pkg,
  .lpp, or whatever) which we could put up in a contrib area.
      

This is something I think we can learn to automate... a fair amount of
effort/research will be necessary, but this is a good area to "recruit"
around, as the problems are widely applicable.  I assume you've seen the
commentary about the growing aggravations of things like RPM lately?