Building/Installing ports as a normal user

[Frank Laszlo]

Last week I was confronted with a problem, I had a port I wanted to 
debug on an alternate platform, and only had a normal user account on 
this platform, specifically sparc64. So my task was to build/install the 
port as a normal user without root access. This posed to be a difficult 
task. There was many make.conf options and environment variables that 
needed to be set. All and all, I got it to work. I'm sure there is a few 
bugs in the system, but I would like others to test it and give me some 
feedback. I'm in the process of writing an article for FreeBSD Diary, 
which will document the entire procedure. I have however created an 
installation script that will setup a machine to do this. You can 
download the script from:
http://www.franksworld.org/~laszlof/localuser-portinstall.sh

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me, I am looking 
for any patches or other fixes that may be needed, eventually I will 
have a more proper installation for this, and possibly even a C frontend 
(maybe like a shell wrapper) Thank you all in advance for your support.

Regards,
    Frank Laszlo