Where is the best place to download source folders to?
 

When installing a program from source, where is the best folder to begin the install (aka unpack the files and compile).? I'm running Ubuntu 10.10. I most recently installed PHP 5.3.10 from source and just downloaded the source folder to my desktop and that's where I kept it while installing (I know, this is probably bad practice). Does anyone have any expertise in this?

Honestly, it doesn't really matter where you put them. To keep organized, I keep all of my source directories under ~/SOURCE and/or under my Downloads directory, depending what I am doing.

Welcome to LQ.

The default download folder : /home/<name>/Downloads/

Default build folder : /home/<name>/tmp/
( Or other folder in /home/<name>/ ).

Thanks for the quick responses, I'll do this from now on. What are the consequences of moving my source files after installing? I'm assuming the program will no longer work..

It will have no effect. You can move them, tar them, delete them, whatever you want. Once the program is installed, it's installed. It's similar to deleting the installation file for a Windows program after you've installed it.

Unless I want to the program, right?

You can move the directory anywhere you want, and still run "make uninstall" from the new directory, just as long as you didn't do a "make clean" or other of that nature.

Still won't have any effect (unless you delete the source, then of course you won't have the makefile to run a make uninstall).

I'm sorry that's what I was referring to, only if I deleted the source. Thanks for the answers, I appreciate it.