Comment by phs318u
3 days ago
Back in the day, pkgsrc was a thing (cross-platform; originally from NetBSD). Source based package distribution, it explicitly allowed for unprivileged installation to a prefix of your choice. I became very familiar with it as an ordinary Solaris user 20 years ago.
It's still a thing: https://pkgsrc.smartos.org/install-on-macos/