Pretendroot is an LD_PRELOAD library which overrides some glibc calls, pretending you are root while doing file system operations. The main difference from Debian's fakeroot is that no daemons or other processes are involved, fake ownership and group are stored on the file system, and not in memory, hence it can survive even reboots. This library has been successfully used when building packages for the UHU-Linux distribution. All of its applications are compiled and installed as an unprivileged user. However, there's no need to patch Makefiles; commands such as "install -o root -g mail thisfile ${DESTDIR}/here" work perfectly, and the final packages will have the desired ownership and group.
