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?