[geeks] organization idea

[David Irvine]

I've heard wonderful reports from people using an application called
Stow, which is a GNU App. When you install an application from source,
you use prefix=/usr/local/stow/ then, after you make install you run
Stow. Stow then searches through its files and makes symlinks to where
the file should be. If you want to delete an app completely you just
delete the directory from stow and run stow and it removes symlinks and
uninstalls all traces of your application.

It might be what your looking for.


HTH

David



On Wed, 2001-11-21 at 21:21, 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?
> 
> Just wondering.  
> 
> -- 
> Joshua D. Boyd
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