'Best practices' when installing downloads/programs?
Hi;
This not really a HOWTO question. I have been downloading programs and installing them in Linux for over 2 years now but ... I have been rather cavalier up to now as to where I stick the downloads and archives . I usually 'make' into a /usr/share/directory. RPM's take care of themselves. Does anyone have suggestions for: 1) Where and how to create a specific downloads directory with specific program sub-directories i.e. is /downloads with chown root, chgrp user1 (me), chmod 775 a good idea? Does that give me enough latitude or is it too permissive. I have a two computer home network used mainly by me. 2) When I unzip program.tar.gz or program.tar.bzip2 should I create the tar archive in /downloads/program/archive or should I archive elsewhere? Don't some people use /tmp for archives and is this a good pracitice? 3) After building from an archive to a /usr/share/program directory should I remove the archive directory because its taking up space and is un-neat (space is not a problem at the moment). Or, is it somehow safer to leave the archive in place? After 1 to 2 years on a steep Linux learning curve, its time for me to pause and clean up -- with regards to this issue and several others. I would like to do it properly. Thanks Regards Bill |
Re: 'Best practices' when installing downloads/programs?
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That's just me. I'm sure there's a zillion ways and it probably depends on the setup, users, etc. I'm the only user of my machines (I hope :D) so I do things however I like. |
Personally, I put all of my source trees in /usr/src/, which is owned by root but has group read/write/execute permission for a group that my user(s) belong to. I usually junk the tarballs after compile, and I only keep the trees if it is something that I may need to recompile in the future.
You may want to try out checkinstall. It is a wonderful little piece of programming that allows you to skip the 'make install' phase and instead creates a package from your source tree (It does support RPMs as well as slackware .tgz and debian packages as well I believe). I use to keep most of my source trees around so that I could 'make uninstall' if I needed to, with checkinstall I can just delete the package as I would any other. slight |
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