Our environment is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. By default, RHEL 6 comes with a version of TexLive from 2007. A user would like one of the extensions to TexLive ("PDFTex") to be updated. From everything I can find, the only way to accomplish this is to update TexLive as a whole.
There's an "unofficial" repo online for TexLive 2011, which works with RHEL 6: http://jnovy.fedorapeople.org/texlive/2011/packages.el6/
I added this repo to my personal computer and installed it (all 960 packages!). It forcefully erased any trace of 2007.
However, we have hundreds of users of varying levels of technical knowledge. While it may appear to be fine for me (who has no idea how to really do anything with LateX), it's not realistically possible for me to test all 960 packages, while also confirming one by one that some feature someone may have relied on in the 2007 version didn't get implicitly canned or changed in the later version. Therefore I can't justify installing it to the network just yet.
Is there any way that I can install all 960 packages in a completely isolated and independent location, so that the 2007 version can remain unchanged, while also giving users the chance to check out and informally act as testers for the 2011 version?
