I have seen seemingly contradictory advice on installing software downloaded from the internet. On the one hand, people install software using the ./configure
make
make install
combo (such as this question. On the other hand, I have followed other advice to just download the package, unarchive, then copy into /usr/bin
(which worked for PhantomJS).
Why do we have different ways to do this?
Another related question is, for the second method of copying files into /usr/bin
, sometimes people create a link to the files in /usr/local
. What's the difference from directly copying in to /usr/bin
?