Those are good reasons to use packages. I guess my question was poorly worded. I was just thinking that if the program is of enough interest to retire evince, then installing by hand would likely be easy if there's no package.
In the case of mupdf the install is particularly short, e.g.:
Code:
% make prefix=/usr/local install
install -d /usr/local/bin /usr/local/lib /usr/local/include
install build/debug/pdfshow build/debug/pdfclean build/debug/pdfdraw build/debug/pdfextract build/debug/pdfinfo build/debug/mupdf
/usr/local/bin
install build/debug/libmupdf.a /usr/local/lib
install fitz/fitz.h mupdf/mupdf.h /usr/local/include
Anyway, I'm sure you'll get it done in the best way available for you.