Re: Newbie Questions - Program dir?

[Steve Witt <sawitt@electra.rsc.raytheon.com>]

On Fri, 6 Apr 2007, Gilles Mocellin wrote:

> Le jeudi 05 avril 2007 23:15, Randy Patterson a écrit :
> > I am in the process of RTFM, I'm in chapter 4 :-) and have googled without
> > really finding an answer. When installing non-Debian packages (EsayEclipse
> > for PHP) from tar.gz files, where is the best place to put them in the dir
> > structure so that all users will have access to them? Is there a 'right'
> > place or does it matter as long as they are outside a users home dir?
> >
> > Thanks in Advance!
> > Randy
>
> You have the choice, but there's two principal ways :
> - /usr/local (default for many "make install" targets, I prefer that)
> - /opt (suse, HP-UX)

I would suggest looking at the 'stow' package also. It allows one to keep 
track of these additional programs installed manually and install or 
deinstall them. Depending upon how much you install in /usr/local or /opt, 
it can be difficult to figure out what package each file corresponds to if 
you ever want to get rid of it.