I need to rebuild the SL4.1 kernel to add support for JFS and XFS.  Are 
there clever ways to do this?  I'm familiar with the brute-force method.

make menuconfig             % to add JFS and XFS
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install

cp bzImage, System.map to /boot
mkinitrd to make a new boot image; I need to add my RAID driver which is
    not in the kernel tree.
edit /boot/grub.conf to add the new kernel image

I tried the kernel's 'make install' but that failed.  Apparently, the
kernel-release was not set up correctly.  I'm guessing that this is set up
in the spec file and since I was doing this manually, some things got left
out.

What I need is to build it with the given spec file, but I need the build to
use my new config file.  Do I simply add a patch file for the .config and
fiddle the spec file to include it?

I can do all this, but I'm curious if there is a cleverer way.

Ken