How do you mantain addons for different installations?

As most of the people here, I have more than one wow folder. Six, to be specific. One for solo play, one for multiboxing - main and 4 for the multiboxing - slaves.
Of course, I have symlinked whatever can be shared and it all works pretty well.

However, I am bit torn on the Interface/Addons folder.

Slaves have different needs than my main (slaves have really few addons, while my main has a more tweaked UI) and my solo folder has slightly different needs too (don't use Jamba, have raid addons.. and so on) so basically my 6 wow installation have 3 different addons needs.

At the moment, I have 3 different Addons folders, one for solo, one for main and one linked by all the slaves. It works fine.. but updating is a PITA, as wowmatrix and similar only see one folder, and then I have to manually copy addons (if they are needed).

I was thinking about using a single Interface folder to streamline the update process, but I've found that "this addon is loaded by default" is saved into the .toc file, so I can't have different default addons for each wow installation, I should work directly on the Addons.txt files in each character folder.
This is possible, of course, and doable with a script. But I was wondering if there was an easier solution.

So.. addons addicts.. how do you manage addons for your different WoW installations?

I symbolic link all my installs to one addons folder. Yes there are addons available for slaves that they won't ever use but that is ok. The system works well for me.

Only updating one folder makes life much easier. Another option you can use , which I used with Jwow ace updater, is copy your wow matrix to different directories x6 and point each one to a different install. You will have to run each one seperately but will still help to streamline it some.

Good luck.

I also have the interface/addons directory symlinked, the updates are much easier that way, and also the addons enabled and disabled information is stored in the WTF folder which i leave seperate, so I can just disable the complex unnecessary addons for the accounts running from my followers directory without affecting the settings for accounts running from the main directory.

I have never noticed any default loading addons that have caused any trouble or gone back to enabled after updating when they are disabled. What types of addons are you seeing loading without giving an option to disable on the character select page?

I think the overrides for which addons are loading should be in the
"World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\ACCOUNTNAME\REALMNAME\CHARACT ERNAME\AddOns.txt" files,
and should not be altered by updating an addon folder in a symlinked interfaces directory.

Though this may require you to check the box for just changing the addons selection for this character to create the localized addons.txt file.

I also symlink the folder in addition to other folders. I don't load all the addons on each toon though as you can select which addons you want to load on the main login screen. For example, my folder has Questhelper and Auctioneer, but I don't load those on any of my slave toons but the option is there [just not selected]. I assumed this doesn't cause any issues, but I never really thought about it.

Yup second.. or third... symlink addons.

If you insist on having separate addon folders you do not have to manual copy the addons you can simply change the wow installation location in WOWmatrix and it will resync to it.

Being as paranoid as I am about things like addons, I always had seperate folders, updated manually. Everything was downloaded to a folder on my desktop, where I scanned each one. It really wasn't that much more work to open each of my folders and drop my cleared addons into them, especially since I only updated once a week. If that. Most of the time nothing needed updates.

I stopped using Symlinks and just went back to 1 install. Then I just virtualize the config.WTF files. 1 Folder to update / maintain w/ video/sound settings different on all 5 if I want.

Currently I make use of the Curse Client to keep my addons up to date in the 4 folders I use. The Curse client used to work for 1 install only, but the later versions support multiple wow installs which was exactly what I was missing in it :)

I use the curse updater with different tags for each copy of WoW that i use.. the slaves have fewer addons than my main so they usually load quicker..

all i have to do is run update and it takes care of it for me