[log in to unmask] writes:

> yum --installroot=/tmp/mychrootenv install x.rpm y.rpm ...
>
> Hth,
>   Stephan

It does.  In the end I used this method.  

rpmstrap turned out to be little brittle in the sense that one has to
carefully list what packages, including versions one wants and they
only have predefined lists for sl304 and 402 and I want 4x.  I wrote a
little script to try to update the 402 to 4x but then bumped into
dependencies not being satisfied and gave up.

Rpmstrap seems to be abondonware.  Also, the SL modules were written
by Progeny Linux which is (to my surprise) a recently ex-company.  So
the outlook is not good.


The yum method seems to work fine with a few caveats:

 - Apparently /mychroot/etc/fstab is not created by any package.  This
 trips up various packages' installation scripts.  rpmstrap's sl402
 module explicitly touches it before starting its install.

 - Debian's rpm package doesn't create /var/lib/rpm which yum assumes
 to exist so it must be made by hand.

Thanks,
-Brett.