I find myself installing things in /usr/local/ occationally. There is a type of "package management" system exclusively for /usr/local/.
For folks who do install things in /usr/local/, you may be interested in the following: http://www-wsg.cso.uiuc.edu/duct/ and some more info can be found at http://uiarchive.uiuc.edu/encap/ The first URL is a page where you can download "epkg" a more advanced version of "encap," which is described in the second URL. Encap package management basically takes precompiled binaries and makes symlinks for you in the appropriate places of /usr/local/. It's nothing that couldn't be done manually, but if you install something largish or several packages in /usr/local, then it may help. For example, an encap package is simply a tarball; typically it is extracted into /usr/local/encap, making the following directories: /usr/local/encap/<packagename>/bin /usr/local/encap/<packagename>/man /usr/local/encap/<packagename>/lib Symlinks are then made from /usr/local/encap/<packagename>/bin to /usr/local/bin and so on and so forth. The definition is a bit sketchy, but if you're interested, check out the web pages. There is a distribution, Nomad (www.nomadlinux.com) based entirely on this system, and the developing University of Illinois Linux distrib is based on this. I find epkg works great with dpkg -- the two never know each other exist, and they never get in each other's way (so to speak). Epkg is entirely /usr/local, and dpkg handles the rest. I thought perhaps someone would find this useful, especially if you play around in /usr/local often. I used it to install xemacs 20.3, because xemacs 20.4 has the gpm console ctrl-z bug. Just thought someone might be interested!
