Have him look at

http://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions/6x/build/

and at least the presentation from November 04, 2010 titled 'New Tools
Used by the Scientific Linux Team' in

http://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/presentations/

(Somebody at SL needs to fix the cut-and-past error in the conference
link)

Armed with the knowledge found therein, he might be able to mollify
management.

Tony

On Thu, 2012-01-19 at 15:39 -0500, Michael Tiernan wrote: 
> On 1/19/12 3:28 PM, Alan S. House wrote:
> > If I understand you, do you want to re-build the rpm's from source and 
> > basically build your own SL distribution from source on your own 
> > repository? If so that's something that my organization is wanting to 
> > do also and I would be interested in any documentation and how to info.
> 
> Hi Alan. I'm including the list in the conversation only for completeness.
> 
> In his words "Some shark has asked fish who asked fish who told fish who 
> told me." that they wanted to be able to, in case of "emergency", build 
> *any* component of the system exactly as the "vendor" (ScientificLinux) 
> does.
> 
> I think it's an "over the top" request but I see the logic. They want to 
> make sure that each step they take is on solid footing, they don't want 
> to find that they and/or their customers are abandoned should something 
> go wrong. (Read that as CentOS, a problem they ran into head first.)
> 
> So, I was *sure* I'd seen it before but obviously I was wrong and the 
> answer that Pat provided is a very good start for them. (And I might do 
> it too just to learn it.)
> 
> I've passed on the info and we'll see what happens. :)
> 
> I've asked him, should he be able to, provide *back* the documentation 
> on how he got from point A to point Z but with his company's management, 
> I'm not sure yet.