Where do I "install" downloaded programs

[Marklar]

Let's say I find some cool tarball that I want to download, unzip, compile, and use on my system (RH 9.0)

Which directory should I download and unzip it in ? My home directory ? Does it matter ?

Sould I do all the configure, make, etc in that same directory ?

After all of the compiling and linking and stuff is a "log" saved somewhere that will tell me where everything was put ?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[rocketpcguy]

put it anywhere, and gunzip in. all programs gets installed whereever they like, but will place a file in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. so if you installed gedit, just type gedit in a terminal

[EnigmaOne]

I just made a directory in '/usr/etc' called 'inst' and gave it rwx for my user. Everything I D/L goes in its own subdirectory inside of '/usr/etc/inst' and is installed from there.

Seems more organized that way, and '/usr' is on its own partition, so an OS reload/swap doesn't negatively affect the contents.