Alternative way to install hacks

[Harley77]

After looking though all the plugins/products installed on my site and removing a number of them, I wanted to have a way of better managing the actual files. Right now, they are all mingling inside the forums/ directory and the various subdirectories without a real way of singling out individual hacks and removing the unneeded files. So I thought, what about using symlinks. Basically, create a subdir called "addons". Inside the addons directory, create a subdir for the product your installing, for example, v3arcade. Inside of there, you would unzip the file so it's structure is intact. the root of the v3arcade/ would correspond to the root of the forums, under that you would have admincp, includes, etc.

Now, just create symlinks to all the files in their corresponding directories under forums.

It should function the same as if you were plopping in the actual files. Later on, if you remove the product, you can either delete the directory or rename it. This would break the symlink. After its broken, you could run the following command from the forums directory to prune out all the dead links.

rm `find . -type l -print | perl -nle '-e || print'`

Sound plausible?

[Paul M]

Sounds complicated, I really can't see anyone bothering to do all that (and it won't work on Windows anyway).

[Harley77]

Yeah, it adds some steps to the install process, but, I can't seeing it putting off those who are comfortable with the command line (and use linux of course). Especially those who are as anally retentive as I am about unneeded files floating inside of their forum directories. There just isn't anything I've seen that helps to manage the actual file structure of vB. Seperating out vb files from addon products can be a chore if you don't know exactly what the names were that it used.

[Paul M]

Beyond compare soon sorts them out for me.