How to build an RPM distro chroot with the minumum of tools...
I've written an evil bash script that will (just about) resolve dependencies of an rpm based distributions files, and install them in to a chroot. It appears to work on my debian system quite well, with just the straight debian version of "rpm" from unstable, and some sed, grep and temporary files.
If you're interested in taking a look, then it's available at http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/rpmbased-dist-chroot.html .