On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 19:22, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Thursday 21 August 2003 20:14, Rob Cakebread wrote:
> > Does anyone think its a waste to add all the sudo stuff and run as regular
> > user? Or just run the app as root?
> 
> i think ideally it would work like this:
> sudo root to fetch (or maybe just portage ?)
> sudo root to pkg_setup
> run as portage to digest/unpack/compile/install
> sudo root to qmerge
> -mike

Debian has a package called fakeroot
(http://packages.debian.org/fakeroot):

--
This package is intended to enable something like:

  dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
i.e. to remove the need to become root for a package build. This is done
by setting LD_PRELOAD to libfakeroot.so, which provides wrappers around
getuid, chown, chmod, mknod, stat, ..., thereby creating a fake root
environment. 

If you don't understand any of this, you do not need fakeroot!
--

I haven't used it myself, but perhaps this would be a starting point?