installing packages without sudo access

You can install individual .deb files in your home directory with:

dpkg-deb -x /path/to/some.deb $HOME

But this does not take care of the dependencies like aptitude or apt-get does.

Check out NixOs (LWN). Packages are isolated (sometimes the distribution needs to patch them) and can be installed several times, at different versions, or by different users.

jhbuild can automate a big cmmi process. But someone needs to write a moduleset (a dependency graph).

If you're going with the manual configure/make all install process, it is possible to use stow to simplify installing things in your home. Stow is helpful to install things in several prefixes but use only one prefix for dependency resolution.

dpkg can be coerced to install in a different prefix with instdir/admindir/root, but this is only useful for chroot environments.

There's actually a tool for that that i just made today https://github.com/z3r0n3t/pkget All you need is access to bash no root are anything special You can use whet to download it as a zip file or use git clone Really hope this helps someone