Marc Feeley shared a nice hack that may allow the archives distributed by Dust to be used without patching.
This approach will work for the runtime and core programs (chicken, csc, and csi), but the extension-related tools (chicken-install, etc.) have some assumptions baked in that prevent this trick from working seamlessly. Specifically, the build and install scripts generated during egg installation assume PREFIX is an absolute path.
Leaving this ticket open as it's a nice idea, but that will need to change before this can progress.