At work i am forced to use an old version RedHat enterprise. This is okay for most purposes, but there are some applications where I really want to use a newer version (vim, ctag, git, tmux, etc…).
As I am not root on the system, I have overcome this problem by creating a “myroot” folder, where i have installed all the application and libraries I need. To activate those I set the PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PKG_PATH ( and others) environment variables.
This is working fine, and my system administrator is happy with the solution (it does not course extra work for him). The problem is that I want more and more demanding applications with more dependencies, which make this solution hard to maintain.
The system is build around a set of shell scripts, but I am considering to convert it to bitbake files.
My question is now if there exists an existing tool/distro which allready fits my needs.
You can try using pkgsrc. It does pretty much exactly what you’ve been doing, but will manage dependencies for you.
(Also look at http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/faq.html#non-root-pkgsrc)