yes, parrot developers run it from the build directory. as far as i know, parrot install works okay, but when installing a new parrot release on top of an old one, it may run into trouble with previous library files lying around. i program on windows, and out of the build dir, so i'm not very familiar with the problem. there are (or were) rpms and we're getting the debian package back up to date.
but as i said earlier, development pace is rapid. in the past two days, i've added named, optional, and slurpy parameter passing to nqp (not quite perl--a subset of perl 6), the language perl6 uses to transform its parse tree into an abstract syntax tree. in another day or so (holidays excluded) i should have that working in perl6, too.