Kai,

Could you use Gentoo Prefix and then follow the ROS Gentoo installation
tutorial?

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/

I've never tried it, but it might be able to do what you guys need.

-j
On Jan 24, 2013 3:38 AM, <Kai.Krieger@dlr.de> wrote:

> Hello Everybody,
>
> Thibault Kruse told me that it would be a good idea discussing this topic
> in this mailing list. Regarding from ros answers:
> http://answers.ros.org/question/52981/ros-installation-without-root/
>
> Here the communication:
>
> 2_socke asked:
> ############################
> I suppose that it happens quite often that people that are working in a
> closed environment without root access want to use ros. cf.
>
> howto install w/o root priviliges
> http://answers.ros.org/question/44030/howto-install-wo-root-priviliges/
> Installation of wstool and rosdep from source
> http://answers.ros.org/question/52190/installation-of-wstool-and-rosdep-from-source/
>
> In our case for ros fuerte for example we ended after 2 weeks of work with
>  a big shell script downloading all the system dependencies (like for
> example BOOST, Log4cxx, PCL or OpenCV), installing it to $ROS_ROOT/usr and
> after that building ros form source while patching many CMakeLists.txt
> files. I took a look at groovy and suppose that at least the building of
> ros with catkin should work quite fine due to the fact that building flags
> can be passed directly to cmake. Now the question: Wouldn't it be nice for
> people working in such an environment to get a package manager installing
> packages from source? This could be then called by rosdep. With this it
> would be also possible to install ros on every Linux as the native package
> manager does not need to be called. If there is interest in something like
> that, I would like to work on such a software package.
>
> KruseT answered:
> ############################
> I assume you mean a new custom package manager written for ROS and any
> Linux. Similar projects exist such as pkgsrc, autoproj, jhbuild. Also e.g.
> see robotpkg. If you want a solution like that, it would be wise to look at
> either of these first.
>
> The following is mostly my personal opinion:
>
> The ROS community decided rather to avoid own tooling as much as possible,
> and rely on existing package-managers where possible. The main problem is
> the effort that it takes to maintain any toolset, dragging down ROS
> resoures that could work on something else instead. The catkin build system
> is geared towards making it much easier to package software for plenty of
> different *nix systems, and patches to CMakeLists and such to make a
> package more compatible will also be accepted.
>
> So if you want to put effort into something, for groovy it would probably
> be more appreciated if you either created packaging for a not-yet supported
> Linux distro or maintained instructions for how to install no a not yet
> supported distro, see http://www.ros.org/wiki/groovy/Installation
>
> PS: For a larger audience, this could be discussed at ros-users, maybe.
>
> ####################
>
>
> The problem as I see is that in administrated IT infrastructures normally
> it is not possible to update system libraries that easy. Of course our
> administrator could install a newer boost version, but if half of the rest
> of the system is not running anymore this is a really bad idea. The normal
> update cycle of such a system is about 4 years. And of course packages like
> ros needs to be installed globally to everybody. The question is, if there
> is a tool that could install the ros system dependencies to a different
> location and could also be included inside rosdep like any other package
> manager.
>
> Regards
>
> German Aerrospace Center
> Robotics and Mechatronics Center
>
> Kai Krieger
> Mit freundlichen Grüßen
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