[pacman-dev] use of /usr/local with pacman

I just updated the installed pacman and noticed makepkg.conf's use of /usr/local in strip, doc, and man dirs. Should pacman allow any files to be installed into /usr/local? I've been an administrator on various UNIX clones for more than a decade and packages that were installed by the package manager, whether precompiled or a build recipe, always avoided /usr/local and any "local" modifications were put exclusively in /usr/local with PATH and library search path having /usr/local first so the user's modifications would take precedence. Just curious if pacman makes such a policy or if it is up to the PKGBUILD author. -- Jeff My other computer is an abacus.