As the binaries work on all Suse distributions, I though to skip the build process and just have the binaries unpacked by rpm and then add the suse-specific files to the correct places. These additional files are mainly kde.desktop files, icons and
export STADENROOT=/usr/local/staden-linux-1-4-1
and sourcing
/usr/local/staden-linux-1-4-1/staden.profile
in ~/.bashrc.
Thus the unpacking would be just
tar --extract --verbose --gzip --absolute-names --file=staden-linux-1-4-1.tar.gz
and
chown -R root:root /usr/local/staden-linux-1-4-1