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> doesn't provide a configurable install dir

This is completely false. You can change the installation directory at the cost of losing binary packages. When you change it, packages would be built from source instead. This is what Homebrew does too.

What's more, I don't think many package managers provide this option. Not apt, not yum.

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Homebrew itself recommends you not do this, and while it is getting better at working in this case you will still run into issues if you try to do certain things.

[Spack](https://spack.io) uses patchelf and additional tooling to relocate it's binary packages to other paths. It generally works, although one has to special case things that burn their install directory into their builds (e.g. Perl).

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