Thanks for the advice. I wasn’t really contemplating FC6->FC12 as in something I was going to do this weekend.
More just the idea of the best way to go about it in general.
I like the idea of tarring /etc and the rpm command you gave me (although sometimes I build from source and then make install - that wouldn’t help me there, would it?)
No. There is a program you might want to look at though, called "checkinstall". You do your make then checkinstall instead of make install, and it creates an RPM for you. I really liked it, but these days, just about everything I need is in the repos, and I don't really have to muck about with compiling programs anymore.