permissions in /etc/raddb

After a clean rpmbuild of 2.0.3, radiusd -X yielded some errors processing files in /etc/raddb. I ran strace and found permission denied on relevant files. The rpm installed files in this dir with ownership root.root, so naturally radiusd cannot read them. Is it preferable to allow read access to the files (I have no passwords in these files, using SQL) or to change the ownership? Andrew