When I built my own packages, back in the old days, I would never adhere to this standard. I found spreading different pieces and parts of the same app all over

When I built my own packages, back in the old days, I would never adhere to this standard. I found spreading different pieces and parts of the same app all over the filesystem to be a bit bizarre. If I built Apache, it was built with a prefix of /usr/local/apache_VERSION, with a link from /usr/local/apache. This made it easy to upgrade: I'd build a new version (with a new prefix), migrate the configs (if needed), change the symlink (which was really just for each of tracking the current version), then blow away the old version. This was back in the "servers as pets" days.