[bityard]

It's been common convention for decades that if you distribute a source tarball of something, that everything inside is inside a directory named foobar-1.0 where 'foobar' is the project name and 1.0 is the version.

Not everyone does this, of course, but it's nice when they do. Because it means you can just wget the file into a dir and untar it without worrying about it messing up whatever is already there. Also handy for putting different versions of the project side-by-side.

[OJFord]

Ok, but like you say it's a mixed bag - I 'wget the file into a dir and untar it without worrying about it messing up whatever is already there', because nothing is, it's a mktemp -d or manual equivalent.