Are there any reasons to not install binaries, etc in a user's home dir?

I'm a user on a shared computing environment. More often than not, the system doesn't have most of the libraries I need or the binaries and programs are atleast 4-5 versions old. It's so cumbersome to email the sysadmins each time to update packages etc, that I've started installing them to a folder in my home dir.

My question is: are there any negatives to doing this? Can I also install the latest version of my shell to my home dir and chsh to use that? Certain packages have a lot of files. Will this affect login times (I presume the syst开发者_StackOverflow中文版em has to stat() my entire home dir and check with quota)?

Typical practices is to have a ~/.bin directory with symlinks to your local executables. That way, you don't have to update your PATH for each new app, just the links.

Yes, what you describe is a common practice, though usually one doesn't need the number of packages/libraries you seem to. Do be careful if applications or libraries make assumptions about where they're installed...

There should not be any significant effect on login times.