Yes your ideology matches my own... as I felt the calc3d stuff should be system wide, but I also pictured CS to be as well. Currently cal3d and cyrstall are in their default install (usr/local/lib). Cel and planeshift exist locally. Do you see any problems that might arise from this scheme?
Perhaps it may not matter. It just bothers be that there is a bunch of stuff thats just not needed in my build directories. I was trying emulate your release distro, but this turned out to be to troublesome to be worth my time.
Incendently... I noticed that the configure script for CS, can take a ton of externally dependencies for graphic libs and such, although it appears that only a few are needed. Do any of thes (too many to name) increase performance of the game at all?
Last but not least, while running some of the test applications in CS, there were problems loading plugins. Is this a problem and is there a fix? Everything seemed to build correctly.
(Maybe I should had started a new thread)