[raehik]

This is one of the many problems Guix solves on a slightly lower level than most package managers, because binaries live inside Guix packages (/usr/bin is simply populated by absolute symlinks). Of course package managers also do this, but Guix kind of lets you symlink to a (unique) package, rather than `install`.

[johnisgood]

For stuff I compile from scratch I just use a symlink-based package manager I found online:

https://zolk3ri.name/cgit/zpkg/

It seems very minimal but supports my requirements. It makes sense to me, because everything gets installed (usually via make install) to ~/.local/pkg/foo-1.0/ and the like, and then symlinks are created to, say, ~/.local/{bin,etc,include,lib,man,share,var}. According to the source code, it is configurable via environment variables. It seems to share similarities with GNU's stow.