Interesting.

I tend to just build stuff myself from source and use GNU stow. I'm amazed I hear so little about stow, it's so useful.

I just configure with a prefix arg of something like /usr/local/stow/package-version, then use stow to install in /usr/local/{bin,etc,lib} etc. etc. Works equally well in one's home directory, which is what I used to do at work.