strange problem with checkinstall and spamassassin

[M.W. Chang]

I was trying to install Mail-SpamAssassin-2.60 from tarball.
Perl Makefile.PL
make
checkinstall

I ran into this error:

Installing RPM package... FAILED!

*** Failed to install the package

Do you want to see the log file?  [y]:
error: cannot open file
/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/Mail-SpamAssassin-2.60-1.i386.
rpm: No such file or directory

why would there be a "redhat" word when I am using caldera OpenLinux system?