[geeks] organization idea

[Joshua D Boyd]

On linux and irix boxes, it seems to be fairly standard to have large 
directories of programs.  For instance, /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin.

Now, do to recent experiences of trying to clean old programs off of systems, 
I'm wondering if there is a better way.

Specifically, when I install a binary program (like Mozilla, Blender, or BMRT),
I usually stick it in a directory under /usr/local 
(/usr/local/mozilla-long-directory-name-here, /usr/local/BMRT-2.4, 
/usr/local/blender which is a symlink to /usr/local/blender-another-long-dir
since blender keeps upgrading every other month or so), and the create symlinks
(so /usr/local/bin/rendrib points to /usr/local/BMRT-2.4/bin/rendrib, etc) so
that I don't need a ridiculously long $PATH.

Now, I've been considering extending that practice.  So rather than have gtk go
in /usr/local, I would have it go in /usr/local/gtk, then go through and create
symlinks for all the files in /usr/local/gtk/bin to /usr/local/bin, and so on.
I'm thinking that the advantage of this would be that if I want to remove GTK,
I could just rm -rf /usr/local/gtk, then run a script to look for and delete
dead symlinks.  So, my /usr/bin directory would still be huge, but with mainly
only symlinks.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?  See why it is a bad idea or anything? 
Why isn't something like this done already?

Just wondering.  

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd