A local package manager for non-root linux users.
Bringing easy package compiling, dependency resolution, and uninstallation to the masses.
Install Spackle
git clone https://github.com/kristi/spackle.git
./spackle/bootstrap-spackle
source ~/.spackle
Use Spackle
spackle --help
spackle install libffi python2
spackle upgrade python2
spackle uninstall python2
spackle find python2
spackle findall python2
spackle deps python2
spackle pkgbuild python2
spackle show python2
spackle list
All modern package managers (like apt-get, yum, pacman, dpkg, rpm, nixos) believe that only root users should install packages. But sometimes normal users need to install stuff too.
Most sysadmins would rather be shot than give you root access. So the normal user who wants to install some software typically has to compile their own software from source. This usually means downloading a source tarball and running
tar zxvf foo-source.tar.gz
cd foo-source
./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
make
make install
If you're lucky, everything worked and you have a binary you can run at $HOME/local/bin/foo. The more likely scenario is that there was an error somewhere: you need to pass some flag to configure or there are some dependencies that you need to install first. Pray that you don't need to patch the source or uninstall.
Luckily, there are devoted people who build packages for linux distributions. You can either extract their binary package (e.g. .deb, .rpm, .pkg.tar.xz) into your home folder (or somewhere you have write priveleges) or you can use their build scripts to compile the package from source and change the installation location.
They've already listed the dependencies and created the build scripts with proper flags.
Inspired by ArchLinux's user repository of PKGBUILD scripts, python's pip and virtualenv tools, ruby's rubygems and rvm tools.