Modern development environment on dated RHEL

[Elazar Leibovich]

Due to company's policy, our development desktop stations must have RHEL 4.7
installed on them.
However, RHEL's packages are extermely out of date (for instance, it still
have python 2.3, etc.), and we wish to use many up too date development
tools (I'm not aiming to the bleeding edge, however a stable release from
the last year seems to me a desirable goal).
We mostly need user-space software (editors, scripting environment, etc.).
What's the best method to

   1. Use reasonably new user-space software on RHEL 4.7
   2. Not to break too much the entire RHEL echosystem, or at least provide
   to ourselves a clear way to upgrade the foreign packages we'll install.

I'm not really familiar with managing Red-Hat distribution, so any advice
will be welcomed.
Thanks
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