Hello, There is a fairly new trend out there, best represented by brew.sh and conda.io, to have user-installable packages. These come very handy in HPC-near environments or other shared resources that do not grant root access. In computational biology it is bioconda that is attracting many users.
I have not completely thought this through. Admittedly, there is something in me that says that it does not matter since Debian should care more about what the OS is and not what the users use on it. But then again, it is exactly via those user-centric bits that we attract new developers for our distribution. And quite some packages in our distribution do not really need to be installed as root if they were installed where the user has write permissions. There would hence be little overhead over what we have now. Should we not somehow find ways to tag any such location-agnostic packages and prepare dpkg for installing e.g. in $HOME/.debian when it is executed as non-root? Best, Steffen
