Hi Bill, I know you asked for how the pros do it, but I'll toss my opinion in anyway. :) > How do the 'pros' go about organizing their application downloads > and installation. > For example, for downloaded rpm and *.tar.gz files I create a new > folder /downloads/newapp and move the downloaded file there. I want > to keep an original copy of the download. I don't have any tarball installs on my system. If I like an app, I package it as an rpm and install it that way. This allows me to easily install it on my other systems without needing to rebuild it on each one (when they are the same OS version that is). I also don't download many binary rpms. I get the srpm and rebuild it when that's possible and feasible. One exception I can think of is the VMware rpm. Since I have so few of them, I don't spend much time organizing them. > When I use the Archive Manager, where is the best place to put the > opened package? > /downloads/newapp; /tmp; /usr/local, What? It depends on what you're going to do with it. I untar stuff in /tmp a lot because I don't plan to keep it around for long. If I actually use the application, I make an rpm out of it and then the original tarball and the untarred source can be deleted since the srpm contains the tarball and the instructions to unpack and build it. If you are planning to install from the tarball and want to be able to use the "make uninstall"* that may come with it, then you'd want to keep the unpacked source somewhere more permanent. Some reasonable locations IMO would be ~/src or /usr/local/src. Obviously, there are many other reasonable places as well. * Do beware of running make uninstall (or make install for that matter) as root. If the tarballs Makefiles aren't setup right, they could easily delete (or install) things that you don't want. > Then when I install, where is the best place to install /usr/share > or /usr/local or /usr/local/share or whatever. Usually, you'd choose either /usr or /usr/local. Some folks also like /opt. Still others use a --prefix somewhere in their home dir, like ~/usr. I don't think you'd generally want to install to either /usr/share or /usr/local/share. Installing from rpms, I use /usr. > How about Fedora extra installs? Under Fedora 7 there will no > longer be an extras repository, but from my (as a user) perspective > there will be some applications that I may want to just try out etc. > and not necessarily make part of my main system. How will ( or do I > need to) separate out their installation? I don't think you need to separate them. They'll be rpms, so it will be painless to install them and uninstall them from the system. The main thing is keeping track of what you installed just to test so you can remember to uninstall it someday when you want to clean up cruft. > As I say, up to now it has been kind of a random system ( pardon the > oxymoron ). I would like to regularize my new installations in a > manner that others have found appropriate and/or convenient. I like the policy of using rpms exclusively. That lets me take advantage of the distro tools for managing packages and it's one less thing I have to learn separate ways of doing. (Of course, if you hop between distros it's not as useful. I played with Debian and Ubuntu not too long ago and I managed to figure out how to build .debs there with some help from google and the copious docs on Debian's site. But not everyone likes tinkering with the build process quite as much as I do it seems. :) I've also setup a personal yum repo so that I can easily install the few things that I want which aren't already packaged for Fedora (or that I want to patch/tweak). So if I build a new box and want a copy of the latest gtkpod from CVS with a few little patches I've made, I just do 'yum install gtkpod' and I'm good. That works pretty well for me and has taught me quite a lot more than I thought I'd ever learn about building, patching, packaging, and managing software. -- Todd OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp ====================================================================== Every time I close the door on reality, it comes in through the windows.
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