Ah, well, if you're willing to accept having a frankensystem with a mix of packaged and unpackaged software, sure. ;) I used to do that, back in Slackware days.

It's considered really sloppy and unmaintainable to admin a system like that. Things quickly get out of hand.

That strategy _does_ work if you isolate it to a chroot or a container, but littering /usr/local with all sorts of locally compiled upstream is just asking for future pain. Security updates, library incompatibilities, &c.

Prebuilt binaries might be nice, but I don't expect them for random projects. (and I wouldn't have used them if offered) I do think it's a reasonable expectation to be able to build software w/o essentially setting up a new userland just for that tool though. :)

The method I posted above doesn't write anything to /usr/local. Root isn't required. Everything is written under ~.

Whoa really?

I'm sorry, and retract my ignorant assumption! Going to try it out now.

There are a few packages available, e.g. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/difftastic and https://pkgsrc.se/wip/difftastic.

I've also had requests from Alpine Linux packagers to allow dynamic linking to parsers. This is something I want to support in future, once I'm happy with the basic diffing logic.

I agree it leads to problems but isn't the entire purpose of `/usr/local` to be a dumping ground for locally administered (unpackaged) programs?