The problem: when you install using a package manager like apt or dpkg or rpm, you can easily use that same package manager to uninstall the app, but when you compile an app, uninstalling can be difficult, since nothing kept track of where everything was installed. The solution: checkinstall, which compiles code into a binary of your choice & then installs the newly-created package, thus making it easy to manage & uninstall the software. Nifty, eh? Read Creating .deb-Packages With Checkinstall for a nice HOWTO on the process. It's focused on deb, but you can just as easily create rpm's as well.
Update! Linux.com just published an excellent guide to Checkinstall as well, at CLI Magic: CheckInstall. DEFINITELY worth reading!
(Check out all of my posts on compiling, dpkg, & rpm.)
