I think the point being brought up here is "why don't we wrapperize
<x> to prevent third-party pre-emption of system utilities?" (MTA, DNS,
printing, curses, the list could go on).

To which, of course, the answer is that any utility that seeks to install
itself wholesale in the same place as a system utility is at best
pompously designed and at worst brain damaged.

If we wrapperise EVERYTHING, we invite third party packages to be
horrifically abusive to an otherwise sane system, and I, for one,
do not think this is a well-advised move.  If we do CUPS, what next?

Sorry to pick on CUPS, but it was the example brought up.

My suggestion, for what it's worth from a "narrow-minded" curmudgeonly
young dinosaur of a systems administrator, would be to install them
elsewhere, move the originals aside and symlink from $elsewhere/$binary to
$systemlocation/$binary.  If you de-install, move the originals back
in place.  If you upgrade, move the originals aside and re-symlink.

It's really not that big a deal.  Really.

But out-and-out clobbering system binaries sure doesn't give *me* warm
fuzzies.  Not in the least.

				--*greywolf;
--
"Hello, I've just upgraded my OS to Windows XP..."
"That's mutually exclusive, but go on..."
"Well, my computer doesn't work now."
"Yes, you just said that a second ago."