Ah... that sounds like a very good idea. Thank you. I could then keep a log of of every module installed, so that the installation could be easily reproduced if necessary (either on other machines, or if I somehow manage to befoul this one and need to replace it).

(your ~/ maybe?)

Actually, I tend to put bigger stuff like this into their very own /opt/foo directory, with the source tucked away in /opt/src. This has a nice side-effect of making uninstallion a snap (well, a "cd /opt; rm -fr foo" anyway :) ).