system-wide install instructions should be changed

[manfer]

It is not a good idea to mess up system folders with unnecesary files. The LICENSE, README.md and ChangeLog files has to be excluded when extracting. So it would be a good idea to change the system-wide instructions provided in README.md.

cd /usr/local && tar --strip-components 1 -xzf \
                    /path/to/node-<version>-<platform>-<arch>.tar.gz \
                    --exclude='node-*/ChangeLog' \
                    --exclude='node-*/LICENSE' \
                    --exclude='node-*/README.md'

[sam-github]

Its surprisingly difficult to figure out how to install the linux tarballs on a system, I've regularly come into contact with customers who aren't installing node very well, the docs could definitely use some help on this. @manfer can you PR the README, and be prepared for some discussion?

/cc @rmg

[rmg]

Ya, it's kind of unfortunate that there isn't a shorter way to do it.. As a result, I don't usually bother filtering them out since they happen to be harmless in this case.

[manfer]

@rmg even if it is harmless it is not a good idea. If all packages do the same, systems will finish with a lot of files in unwanted places. As you comment it is unfortunate not having a shorter way.

Another way would be having different builds for local install or system-wide install. On system-wide install if those files needs to be installed should go into one of the doc folders the same as it is done when building and installing with make install. Probably not a good solution having two binaries.

@sam-github sorry, I can't understand "PR the README" meaning.

It is difficult to decide how to install node in linux. Personally I don't like any method that doesn't make use of the package manager. So that excludes building the package and installing with make install, and excludes installing from tarball binary too. Besides, directly unpacking the tarball binary to /usr/local with the command above, and if I'm not wrong, we install the dev package too which is not necessary for most node users.

So, I was going to install from binary tarball when I opened this issue but finally I decided to create rpms myself. Something that was easy because there is a github project nodejs-rpm with the spec file needed to create rpms from node source which is up to date and looks good.

For distros based on enterprise linux there are repositories with versions of node but those are older versions than the current node version. The versions I found in epel and nodesource were 0.10.x. Don't recall the exact build number but it starts with 0.10.

[rmg]

@manfer I wasn't disagreeing, I was just saying that in this case I've just decided to live with it on my systems.

What @sam-github was suggesting was that you open up a pull request that updates the README.md to what you think it should be.

[manfer]

Thanks for clarification @rmg I have opened the pull request.