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You don't have to use a package manager, that's just the approach the TiVo folks came up with a couple decades ago. They use RPM to package independent software modules and check them into (IIRC) a separate build repository which saves the last n months of work. A local config file is used to choose the binary package version to use, or, alternatively, the locally built files to use. They probably could have just made tarballs, since I don't think they used any of the dependency checking.