possible to install an rpm in user space?

[David Burns]

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Ben Cotton <bcotton at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 8:49 PM, David Burns <tdbtdb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What I want to do is to take an rpm, and install it in my personal
>> home directory without using root privileges, for my own use only. Is this
>> possible? What sort of keywords should I use to find this in the
>> documentation or when searching with google?
>>
> If I understand your question,

Not sure how to make it more clear - I want to pop open an rpm and put
all the files somewhere so that I can execute the code (given
appropriate PATH etc. environment variables) without ever using root
privilege or touching any of the sensitive shared directories where
stuff usually gets put in an ordinary install. It should all end up in
my home directory or /tmp, someplace where no other user of that
machine would accidentally execute it. Sort of as if I had compiled it
in my own home directory from scratch. Any dependencies that were
already satisfied would just use the shared instances in the standard
locations, since there's no need to change them. But if additional
rpms needed to be found & installed, they also would need to be
installed in my user space so they don't tromp existing stuff.

>you might try the --relocate option.

Thanks for the hint, that sounds like a starting point.

> Not all RPMs are relocatable, though.

Hmmm.... I guess if I was more familiar with RPMs I'd be able to think
of better examples. Okay, I am too new.

> Another option is to unpack the
> RPM using rpm2cpio [1].

That also looks promising.

It seems to me that this should be automatable, maybe there's just no
demand for it? I am frequently wanting to try out some rpm not built
for my exact system or a newer rev without trampling the existing
installs.

Maybe building my own binary rpm from a source rpm is what I really
ought to be looking at?

> [1] http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/s1-rpm-miscellania-rpm2cpio.html
> --
> Ben Cotton

mahalo,
Dave