Linux: any way to manually build devkitPro without tampering with system directories?

[voidstarp]

Hello.
I would like to learn to develop for the Nintendo DS.
I have Gentoo installed, and i read on the official wiki, that i can use pacman to pull in packages, but I'd rather not install it, because there is a reason, that it's not in the main Gentoo repo. Also the tutorial says to do other stuff too, which I'd rather not do:

Set RootDir to root (/)

I'm familiar and used to building a lot of stuff manually, so I'm prepared if this is not a walk in the park.

So my question is, what are the bare minimum repositories, that I need to build to have a toolchain?
I presume i need the following:

• https://github.com/devkitPro/libnds

• https://github.com/devkitPro/libfat

• https://github.com/devkitPro/dstools

But is there a "core" repository? I tried https://github.com/devkitPro/buildscripts, but the first thing it needs is root access, so no...
Also I saw there a gcc patch. Is that mandatory?
I'd also rather have it sitting in my user's environment only and not in the whole system.

I really would like to get this to work, but I do not want to install stuff all over the system.

[WinterMute]

We don't support users building our packages themselves, sorry. There are around 300 packages with various interdependencies that are difficult to handle without a package manager.

We do provide docker images which may suit you better.

[voidstarp]

yeah, was thinking about something similar: worst case I'll just set up some virtual machine to use as a build system with some easy out-of-the box linux distro

[voidstarp]

built VirtualBox and installed Arch on it.
the whole thing took total about 2 hours and managed to build all nds examples out-of-the-box.
too bad it's not possible to run the toolchain natively, but at least this solution is acceptable for me.

[WinterMute]

To be fair, it's perfectly possible to run the toolchain natively. You just don't want to.

i understand the reluctance around the Set RootDir to root (/) part but all our packages are confined to /opt/devkitpro. We do it this way so all systems have the same layout and operate in the same way. Obviously changing the base path on arch will fail. Changing the base path on other systems will cause failures with pkg-config and various support scripts in some of the packaged portlibs.

The buildscripts, fwiw, don't require root access, only the ability to write to /opt/devkitpro