'Best Practices' for downloads ??

Todd Zullinger tmz at pobox.com
Fri Apr 6 18:17:13 UTC 2007


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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