> and yet where that precompilation implies a burning-in of an installation prefix at build time
Not necessarily. Plenty of software uses relative paths that work regardless of prefix. Off the top of my head, Node.js is distributed in this way.
> you’d need to add that /usr/pkg directory to an unbounded number of little scripts here and there to make things truly work.
How so? Are there that many scripts that entirely replace the PATH environment variable? In Linux, I just include my system wide path additions in /etc/profile which will be set for every login. For things like cron jobs or service scripts, which don't inherit the environment of a login shell, you will need to source the profile or use absolute paths, but that's about the only caveat I can think of.
Not necessarily. Plenty of software uses relative paths that work regardless of prefix. Off the top of my head, Node.js is distributed in this way.
> you’d need to add that /usr/pkg directory to an unbounded number of little scripts here and there to make things truly work.
How so? Are there that many scripts that entirely replace the PATH environment variable? In Linux, I just include my system wide path additions in /etc/profile which will be set for every login. For things like cron jobs or service scripts, which don't inherit the environment of a login shell, you will need to source the profile or use absolute paths, but that's about the only caveat I can think of.