In my set-ups I have different MySQL versions (MySQL 5.0, 5.1, 5.5 and 5.6, Percona Server 13.1 and 24.0, MariaDB 5.2.10, 5.3.3, Galera 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0) running in parallel at the same time.
Up to now I have not found a practical way yet to do this with RPM or DEB packages. If anybody knows how to do it I am happy to hear about it.

So I love and need only binary tar balls. Installation and removal is done within seconds and no remainings are left over after a removal. To operate the whole I use myenv.
Some software providers unfortunately do not provide binary tar balls at all or not in the form I want and need them. Thus I was thinking about how to get those by extracting them from packages. Up to now I have not had the time to write this down. But today was the right time...

RPM

rpm2cpio galera-22.1.1-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm | cpio -vidm
tar czf galera-22.1.1-1.rhel5.x86_64.tar.gz usr
rm -rf usr

Extract with:

tar xf galera-22.1.1-1.rhel5.x86_64.tar.gz

DEB

ar vx galera-22.1.1-amd64.deb
mv data.tar.gz galera-22.1.1-amd64.deb.tar.gz
rm debian-binary control.tar.gz

Extract with:

tar -mxf galera-22.1.1-amd64.deb.tar.gz

The packages look quite the same in size:

-rw-r--r-- 1 oli oli 6725416 2012-02-08 13:49 galera-22.1.1-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm
-rw-r--r-- 1 oli oli 6769606 2012-02-08 14:18 galera-22.1.1-1.rhel5.x86_64.tar.gz

-rw-r--r-- 1 oli oli 1386762 2011-12-12 17:12 galera-22.1.1-amd64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 oli oli 1385994 2012-02-08 14:18 galera-22.1.1-amd64.deb.tar.gz

so I assume that there is nothing lost.

The differences in size between DEB and RPM seems to come from the packaging itself:

usr_deb/lib/galera/libgalera_smm.so:   ELF 64-bit (SYSV), dynamically linked, stripped
usr_rpm/lib64/galera/libgalera_smm.so: ELF 64-bit (SYSV), dynamically linked, not stripped

So nothing to worry. The programs itself worked without any problems after the first tests. So I am optimistic that this is a good workaround until I can convince the software vendor to make good binary tar balls...