I've just obtained an account on shared hosting for my webapp. To make my development environment more pleasant, I'm installing a bunch of stuff (e.g. git, vim) in my /home directory. I guess I could get them installed by my sysadmin, but doing it this way seems to give me more control over things; I don't have to trouble them for updates.
Am I doing this the right way? Should I get my sysadmin to install these things instead? They're running CentOS, which doesn't have a lot of modern packages.
Supposing that this is an acceptable practice, what's the best way for me to manage the things I've installed locally? E.g. so I can do something like
apt-get update
to upgrade everything at once? Do I have a better option than building everything from source, and doinggit pull
andhg pull
for every program I want to update?