What I personally use is a simple scheme that finds all the files that were modified after a certain time. In one window I start a script that creates a temp file. Then in another window I start an installation (running make install). When the install is done, I hit enter in the first window and that script goes looking for all files and directories that were modified after the tempfile was created (the find program does a good job at it).
This scheme detects changed files as well as added files. It doesn't detect deleted files.
Something else I used to do was this:
before installation run "find /" and exclude a few directories like /proc /tmp and what not. Then run the installation. Then run find / again and diff the outputs of the two finds. It'll show you added and deleted files. However it doesn't show changed files.
You could combine those two methods but I don't really care about deleted files. I rarely find a package that actually removes files.
Another things you might consider is a package called "checkinstall" or something. It's a library that's preloaded when you run a program, it can then spy on all system calls made such as the calls to open and write to a file but I've never used it. I create my own Linux from scratch, so I created my own package management scripts to go with it.
An old copy of the scripts I use can be found at
http://linuxfromscratch.org/~gerard
Look for log-install and pkgdel
Package management in LFS
