[geeks] organization idea

[Gregory Leblanc]

On Wed, 2001-11-21 at 13:21, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 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?

It is.  It's called "package management".  When I want to get rid of my
gtk+ install I type 'apt-get remove gtk+', 'rpm -e gtk+', or 'pkgrm
gtk+'.  Sure, not exactly the approach above, but this one scales to an
infinite number of packages, and controls all of the files, not just the
ones that go into $prefix/bin.  Some people don't like package
management, but I find it to be essential for keeping any large number
of machines in-sync with the same package versions on all machines.  Not
sure what the arguments about it are, except maybe that people have had
trouble with poorly packaged software.  
	Greg