kinda newbie question

[Sam Couter]

Kim Holburn <kim.holburn at anu.edu.au> wrote:
> Are you suggesting that we give up everything that doesn't come pre-compiled from a distributor? 

Use Debian. With over 8000 packages, there's not much that isn't
packaged already.

But seriously, I'm not really suggesting that. As Damian (?) mentioned
there are tools which can help manage third-party software. GNU Stow is
one example I can think of:

http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/stow.html

Also, rolling your own packages isn't impossible. There are tools to
assist with that as well. See the dh-make package for Debian. There are
tools for RPMs available too, but I can't find them right now.

> Putting everything in /usr/local (shudder) or /opt is one option.  Of course you have to hope that everything really does go there.

Any software that doesn't install where you tell it to is broken, and
you probably don't want to use it anyway.
-- 
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