package management without root, not under gentoo

sightlessone · n00b Joined: 20 Mar 2003 Posts: 32 Location: Washington

So I've got this computer system where I have a directory in /uns where I have access and basically nowhere else. Currently packages are just installed in an adhoc manner just one at a time. I'm really looking for a way to manage this (including uninstall), although not neccessarily manage dependencies. I would *really* like to use portage as gentoo is the system I generally use, but I'm not sure how well this would work.

Anyone have any ideas? Anything outside of gentoo/portage?

SuperLag · Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2004 1:47 am Post subject:

I'm sorry I can't be of more help, but I suspect that others will have the same issue as me, when they read your post.

WHAT are you talking about??

What is it that you're trying to do? Can you be more specific?
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sightlessone · n00b Joined: 20 Mar 2003 Posts: 32 Location: Washington

I'm a student at the University of Washington, in the CSE program. Support currently controls the images installed on the linux systems here, and in particular all we have is ugly things like twm. I'm the "admin" of a group that has control of the nfs directory /uns on these machines, which is for "unsupported" software.

Currently we've installed software here such as gcc, some libraries, gnome/fluxbox/etc. Basically we'd like to use some modern window managers and a modern gcc that support isn't quite ready to "support" yet.

What I'd like to do is have a package management system that doesn't depend on me having root, nor does it need to have control over the entire distribution. One thing that I have noticed is vaguely like this is "Fink" for mac osX computers, and fink is a hack of apt-get/dpackage/etc.

Our main concern is to be able to uninstall things cleanly, especially so that we can upgrade libraries from time to time. Tracking dependencies of installed packages would be nice, but is not neccessarily something we need.

I would like to use gentoo for this, I'm not sure however if that's entirely possible. So I was wondering if anyone had any insight into this, or ideas on something else that might work.

ecatmur · Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2004 2:45 am Post subject:

If you have a decent amount of quota space (half a gig minimum) you could bootstrap a full gentoo system in there with a chroot. ^_^

Otherwise, you could still use the power of Portage: make a custom make.profile hacked to remove the available tools from the system file (so Portage doesn't try to install them) or simply inject those packages; edit your make.conf to prepend /uns to all paths; add ROOT="/uns" to make.conf to force the merge process to install into that tree; prepend /uns/bin:/uns/usr/bin:... to PATH and so on for all the other path variables.

For that last - and also for ROOT="/uns" - you should maybe consider putting those in the env of all users who will be using your software, and in particular for the user who will be running emerge and will own /uns.

You will also need to hack any hardcoded paths in the Portage tools. When you do so, consider using the ROOT env var as in /usr/sbin/ebuild: