The configure.in for rpm tries to substitute perl/Makefile and perl/Makefile.PL, neither of which exists in the source tarball.
Yup. Doesn't hurt a thing however, will be fixed when I identify (or re-create) working perl bindings.
Still waiting for perl bindings for rpm, Randy Ray's latest per-RPM may be merged into rpm sources. Meanwhile, there's little reason to keep this bug open.