OK, checkinstall works about 95% of the time, but I dislike using it because a lot of times you need to actually install the application before making the package. It also fail miserably on python install scripts, so I have a bright idea. Please tell me if someone has already done this. Why not alter the permissions of the install program so that it runs with the user ID "install." To figure out what files are being written or created, we just need to look for I/O calls that are attached with a user ID install and redirect them to where we actually want them to go (most likely a directory for packaging). This system would allow me to use the default make because custom options fail far too often and allow me to use any strange installer the developer wants without having to learn all the options.
If this design is possible, all I need to know is has this been done before and where do I start. Do I need to rewrite existing kernel code or can I make a module to do this? What would this kind of system be called a wrapper or a driver or something else. Any suggestions on what calls to monitor? Thanks.

You should probably have posted this on the Slackware forum. Some of the Slackware devs hang out there.

I have a nice, more powerful replacement for checkinstall called src2pkg, but since it uses the installwatch libs just like checkinstall and slackpkg, it will not catch the mknod command which is being called to create the device. But I have src2pkg build scripts for several fuse versions.

Src2pkg looks good, but it uses installwatch like you pointed out. Perhaps the idea of making this is laughable to many of you, but this is a really frustrating problem. I want absolute control over where the install program writes files. I will look further into this. Thanks.