using rpms for non-root installs

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 01/31/2013 08:40 AM, Michael Stahnke wrote:
> You actually may have an option. It's dirty, and here be dragons. I
> know this from working on RPM on AIX, so again, it's hacky. I did this
> on a CentOS 6.3 box for my example, should work on Fedora.
>
> You can do something like:
>
>    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 $HOME/.myrpm zip
>
> Results:
>
> [vagrant at localhost ~]$ rpm -q --dbpath /home/vagrant/.myrpm zip
> zip-3.0-1.el6.x86_64
> [vagrant at localhost ~]$ rpm -q zip
> package zip is not installed
>
>
> You now have zip installed (and rooted) in $HOME.  You'd have to add
> the --dbpath option to rpm any time you used it, and it would get out
> of sync with the system rpm database unless you wrote some tooling
> around that. But it's completely do-able.
>
> Again, it's ugly and I don't recommend it.

FWIW, we have a similar script for LibreOffice, 
<http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/setup_native/scripts/install_linux.sh> 
(inherited from its OpenOffice.org ancestry), and at least back in OOo 
times used it frequently to install instances "to the side."  Worked 
reasonably well.

Stephan