On Wed, 30 Jan 2013, Mátyás Selmeci wrote:

This may be a long shot, but I am interested in repackaging some RPMs (for
example, some of the Globus packages in EPEL, as well as grid software that
my group builds) such that the software in them may be installed by
unprivileged users, or into a non-standard location such as an NFS share.
I'd like to use existing RPMs, preferably binaries, as a starting point to
avoid duplicating work. (Naturally a lot of post-install scripting would be
needed to fix binaries such that they'd work with the path they were
installed into).

It depends want you mean by "install" but you can unpack the files in an rpm package with rpm2cpio eg.
cd target/dir ; rpm2cpio <some.rpm | cpio -idmv

    Michael Young