There's a fairly elegant, but seldom used solution to this problem,. GNU
Stow, which is designed to basically be a "package manager" for locally
installed packages.

It works by using symlinks, so that a "package" foo might be installed into
/usr/local/stow/foo and have bin/ and lib/ and all the other expected
subdirectories. Stow will then install that "package" into the /usr/local
hierarchy proper on command by symlinking each file into the proper place,
and as an intended side effect of this design, Stow, or even a simple
she'll script can easily find all the symlinks to remove later, since they
all point to the actual installed files in the package installation
directory.

On Wed, Mar 2, 2016, 12:05 Edward Bartolo <edbarx@???> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 02/03/2016, Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:
> > I'm not recommending this for every app. But I've got to tell you, when
> > you think about installation by package manager, with its pinnings and
> > exclusions and dependencies and conflicts, not to mention sabotage of
> > packaging by the poetterists and their ilk, installation by directory
> > starts to have its own charm, for certain applications.
> >
> > SteveT
>
> However, does copying a directory tree to install a program go against
> conventions where various parts of an installation should be placed?
>
> Edward
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