[SlugBug] where to put applications

[Chris J]

And Lo! The Great Prophet pault uttered these words of wisdom:
> Mornin' buggers 
>  
>
> Before I get too carried away though... [note: my background is Mac/Mac OS X]
> . I'm 
> downloading bits and pieces and on my Mac OS X machine I would then move them
>  into the 
> "Applications" folder. Where should I put these then? I don't want my home fo
> lder cluttered 
> with applications and I know this is not good practice anyway.  
>  

On top of what James said, you may also want to look into a little thing 
called stow; what this does is allow you as an admin to keep individual 
programs in a seperate directory and have stow manage symlinks between the 
directory and /usr/local/{bin|man|lib|sbin|etc}.

Thus, I can keep an entire package together in one directory so upgrading 
and blowing away stuff doesn't involve going "yep, that's part of it" for 
each individual file manually.

Great when you're a source junky :) I've got about three different versions 
of mplayer sitting around, and use stow to move the symlinks about. Once 
I'm happy with an upgrade the old version gets blasted. If the new verison 
doesn't work, I can "stow -D mplayer-0.90" to remove the symlinks then 
"stow mplayer-0.60" to put them back in for the older version.

Some people may object to all these symlinks (it makes /usr/local/bin et al 
look messy as they just contain pure symlinks to places under /usr/local/
stow), but it's great if you play around a lot like me, and are too lazy to 
create your own packages (like me) :)

Chris...

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\ Chris Johnson           \ 
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