Greg_Swift aotx uscourts gov wrote:
If one was to hold true that anything not provided by the OS belongs in /opt, then one could argue that all of EPEL should be configured for /opt, and back in Fedora Extras days, all of Extras should have been in /opt.
I don't know specifically about Fedora Extras, but there have been problems caused by third party package repositories using /usr as their prefix.
Some or all of those issues may have been avoidable if /opt/reponame had been used as _prefix with a single file in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ so the shared libraries would work (without resorting to rpath) and a single file in /etc/profile.d/ to adjust the man path and the execution path.