Julia on a multi-user system

Had occasion to install Julia on a multi-user system today. I downloaded the tarball to my own directory and ran Make. The instructions say that the install is fully contained in the single directory, so you don't have to worry about files being installed in different locations on the system. Once it finished, I moved the directory to a globally accessible location and tried it out. It worked mostly, but nothing about the package

manager would run properly. Eventually I realized that if the directory that I had initially created existed, the package manager worked, but if I deleted it, the package manager stopped working. 

I deleted everything, recreated the directory in its final, globally available location, and ran Make again. Success! Apparently something in that compile process is looking to see what directory it is in and going back to it for data. I'd like to know what that is.