See how the Unified Installer does it. In fact, an RPM of the Unified Installer from Plone.org might be better than just the standalone packages.
Actually, the Unified Installer is what got me started down this road. An RPM of the installer would be cool, but then I thought it would be even better if I had separate RPMs for each component. That way, I wouldn't have to rebuild the whole thing to update Python, Zope, or Plone. The Unified Installer script starts with zlib. There's a stock RPM already available for that, so I didn't bother. Python 2.4 is the next step and the install script looked so simple that I didn't think building an RPM would be too hard. Now, after working on it for two days, I'm thinking otherwise. I'm guessing I'm just making a dumb mistake somewhere though.
Hmmm. Could be related to automatic dependency processing. There used to be alternaive Python RPM's available for CentOS 4, IIRC, but I don't rememebr right off where they were.. lessee... look at http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/2246271/com/python24-2.4.2-10.el... and its parent, http://www.python.org/pyvault/
This may be a base to work from, although it looks like on first blush to want to replace the existing python.
As one who runs Unified Installer-installed Plone sites, I can understand the issues. As one who maintained the PostgreSQL RPMset for five years, I can understand those issues, too, even though it's been three years now since I gave those up.
At this time I just build the UI from source, and run with it, as it's very self-contained. -- Lamar Owen CHief Information Officer Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 828-862-5554 www.pari.edu