We currently have a variety of systems (Linux, Solarix, *BSD, HP-UX ...) on which we are not allowed to install anything into / (but I have root access. That's strange, I know). But we'd like to run Puppet on all of them. So, the obvious idea is to install Puppet with all prebuilt dependencies into some isolated tree, something like "jail", which will allow to use dependences from some prefix and to access the host system. The big advatanges would be uniform deployment and updates.

One solution that came to my mind is to deploy Gentoo Prefix, and install Puppet there with package manager. However, this requires a lot of extra space and some manual patching for each system.

Maybe there are some more elegant and simple solutions?