Michael Stahnke wrote:
  ls zip-3.0-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
  mkdir $HOME/.myrpm
  cp -pr /var/lib/rpm/* $HOME/.myrpm/
  chown -R $USER  $HOME/.myrpm/
  rpm -Uvh --justdb --dbpath $HOME/.myrpm zip-3.0-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
  rpm2cpio < zip-3.0-1.el6.x86_64.rpm | cpio  -idmv
  rpm -q --dbpath $HOME/.myrpm zip
This is very useful. I'll play around with it to see how much tooling we'd have to write around it.

Jan Zelený wrote:
How about using Software Collections? It doesn't solve the installataion by 
unprivileged user but it solves installation into non-standard location:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora_Contributor_Documentation/1/html/Software_Collections_Guide/index.html
You are right, because of the unprivileged user requirement I can't use it directly, but it seems like there's a lot I can learn from how you folks did this.


Also thanks Adam and Kevin for the background knowledge, and in general thank you all for your help!

-Mat

--
-Matyas Selmeci
Open Science Grid Software Team
Center for High Throughput Computing
University of Wisconsin-Madison