How difficult might it be to put the content of a package like .deb or .tar.gz and possibly its dependencies into /opt with something like "dpkg-deb -x example.deb /opt/example"? Obviously .deb packages won't run their install scripts this way, so this would only work with packages that don't need that sort of thing.
I'm pondering trying to use a package this way (Wine32 to be specific, but could apply generally too) to avoid enabling multilib support, and thus avoid the possibility of dependency headaches in the future just to use one package. But that has me thinking about possible problems like hardcoded paths for library and especially support/config files. Libraries can at least be resolved with environment vars.
I'm aware of the possibility of having a debootstrap chroot for this purpose as well, but at least as a thought experiment, what kind of problems might someone run into when trying this with any random package? Upstream's Wine package already places itself into /opt, and obviously is designed to do so. But would Debian's wine32/(un)stable and dependencies tolerate being placed into /opt instead of /usr, for example? Or at least /usr/local. Even if it doesn't work it should then be simple enough to undo everything by recursively removing the /opt/i386/wine dir created. Small things like $PATH might be fixable with a symlink or script dropped into /usr/local/bin, if everything works and one wants to make it more convenient.
Thanks in advance.
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