Installing a package with apt-get for a single user

Question

Is it possible to install a package for just the current user (placing files in locations that the user can write to, such as their home directory)?

Answer 1

It is not possible to install a package in a way that it would run correctly. The closest thing you could get to this is running apt-get inside a virtual machine or LXC container run by a normal unprivileged user. If you want to just unpack the .deb package, you can use dpkg -x archive.deb target_directory, but the installation scripts will not be run, and it will not be installed to the filesystem root.