Errors: Installing a .deb without sudo/root

Question

I have created a .deb package, and I am trying to deploy it without any using sudo/root privileges. However, I am receiving Permission denied messages, and I do not know what dpkg is doing and what is causing it.

Running dpkg -i --force-not-root --root=$HOME/a --log=$HOME/a/log a.deb returns:

(Reading database ... 0 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking tetra-backup (from a.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing a.deb (--install):
 unable to open '/home/simon/a/simon_exec.dpkg-new': Permission denied
Errors were encountered while processing:
 a.deb

Here is the content of the deb ($ dpkg --contents a.deb):

drwxrwxr-x simon/simon       0 2013-09-17 14:49 ./
-r--r--r-x simon/simon    5568 2013-09-16 15:46 ./simon_exec

I want to know what I need to do to resolve the mentioned issue and to deploy the contents under such constraints. If it's not possible, I would like to know why and some alternatives.

Answer 1

Installing with --force-not-root is likely to give you lots of problems. dpkg will most likely not be able to resolve a lot of package dependencies, or install files to certain locations outside of your home directory.

One thing you could try is doing apt-get source <package> and configure it to install locally. This might require you do download and compile all of its dependencies as well though. You will also need the dev tools installed to do it this way.