Re: Software/HD ecology

>>>>> "dmaster" == David Masterson <dmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

    dmaster> The basic problem with this is that, unless you have a
    dmaster> program like Stow to create the symlink farm, it will
    dmaster> require that you modify your PATH(s) to include the
    dmaster> packages that you install.

Only /usr/local/bin needs to be in the user's path. After installing
emacs, I manually make the links from /usr/local/bin to
/usr/local/emacs-21.1/bin.  "make install" can easily make the links
from /usr/local/bin to the actual package directory.

We use this installation policy successfully here. 

Another (unintentional) benefit of this policy is that packages can
be easily migrated to another system (of similar architecture) by
simplying tarring up a single directory and untarring it on the new
system. A colleague wanted my emacs "installation/customizations" on
his GNU/Linux system at home so he just tarred-up
/usr/local/emacs-21.1 ftp'd it home and untarred it, made the symlinks
in /usr/local/bin and was up and running.