RE: sources of debian apps: is there a standard place?

[Stephan Engelke <engelke@math.uni-hamburg.de>]

Hi Dominic,

Dominic Blythe writes:
> i'm pretty new to debian, but i'm compiling things becos what i want isn't
> available as binaries  - i'm praying i'll still be able to search and
> destroy stuff when i want to get rid of it without killing a lot of things i
> don't understand as well :-)

Well, you may want to have a look at a perl script called "stow".
It's included in the Debian distribution.

It does a nice Job of allowing you to use a by-package-directory
structure, while automatically merging everythign together into one
tree by using symlinks.  

You can install your program in say /usr/local/packages/myprog1, 
cd to /usr/local/packages and "stow myprog1".
This will create /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/man/man1 (whatever is
underneat myprog1) and populate the directories with symlinks.

Cheers -- Stephan
-- 
Stephan Engelke                                    engelke@math.uni-hamburg.de

Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the
forces of evil...prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom,
no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. 
Eat leaden death, demon...             -- (Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)