'install' and package management

[Mario Salzer]

What's the purpose of that install utility anyhow? Having a look at
the man page makes it look like just a more fancy 'cp' variant (even
if it has in fact less options and features).

Since it is nowadays mainly used from within those ugly autoconf-
generated Makefiles (make install) - wouldn't it then make sense,
if that install tool did somethink useful, like keeping a list of
what it installed where and when?! It surely is in the position of
tracking manual software installations. Regardless of which format
it stored its installation logs in, that information could later be
converted into whatever file format the surrounding Linux distro
uses and thus allow removal of some of the file mix in /usr/local/*
later.

mario