How I install personal versions of programs on Unix

These days, Unixes are quite generous in what they make available through their packaging systems, so you can often get everything you want through packages that someone else worries about building, updating, managing, and so on. However, not everything is available that way; sometimes I want something that isn't packaged, and sometimes (especially on 'long term support' distributions) I want something that's more recent that the system provides (for example, Ubuntu 22.04 only has Emacs 27.1). Over time, I've evolved my own approach for managing my personal versions of such things, which is somewhat derived from the traditional approach for multi-architecture Unixes here. The starting point is that I have a ~/lib/ directory tree. When I build something personally, I tell it that its install prefix is a per-program directory within this tree, for example, '/u/cks/lib//emacs-30.1'. These days I only have one active architecture inside ~/lib, but old habits die hard, ... Read full article.