Due to the recent number of students using OSX being unable to install the library due to /usr being write-protected, perhaps we should revisit this discussion. I would still hold that the rpm, pacman and deb targets should install to /usr since they will be managed by a package manager, but perhaps the install target should install to /usr/local since then the library would not be managed by a package manager.

At the very least, we could allow this behavior to be changed by an environment variable as some other libraries do where make install would default to /usr but something like INSTALL_DIR=/usr/local make install would cause the library to be installed in /usr/local so we don't have to tell those students to alter the makefile manually.