building packages without running is root

["Mark W. Eichin" <eichin@cygnus.com>]

The hello-1.3 debian.rules does the 'make install' as root, presumably
in order to have correct uid's and permissions on the resulting
tree. While that's certainly a result to be desired, it is
inconvenient when building packages over NFS or in shared environments
where root access is not made trivially available.

Has anyone looked into a way of having dpkg simply perform the
translation while building the archive? It appears that cpio --owner
could do most of the work, or if not, some translation could be done
on the output of cpio within dpkg. Before I look into this further, is
there anything wrong with the idea?
					_Mark_ <eichin@cygnus.com>
					Cygnus Support, Eastern USA

(quote from man cpio...)
       -R [user][:.][group], --owner [user][:.][group]
              In copy-out and copy-pass modes, set the  ownership
              of  all  files created to the specified user and/or
              group.  Either the user or the group, or both, must
              be present.  If the group is omitted but the ":" or
              "." separator is given, use the given user's  login
              group.   Only the super-user can change files' own-
              ership.