Hacky way to use already made RPMs as a non-root user.

gistfile1.txt

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@localhost ~]$ rpm -q --dbpath /home/vagrant/.myrpm zip
zip-3.0-1.el6.x86_64
[vagrant@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.

wow!
great hack