Re: make uninstall

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From: Jonathan Trites
Subject: Re: make uninstall
Date: 21:28 on 06 Aug 2005
> It's a crappy solution, but if you re-ran the `make install`, it should
> show you a list of where exactly it vomited files on your system. You
> could use that as a starting list for things to purge.

This is exactly the thing I'm talking about. Sure, make install tells
you what's happening. It's just that it vomits 800 millions screens
worth of stuff out. Yeah, like I'm going to manually go through all
that. And no, I'm not going to write my own utility to do that because
I don't know nearly enough about makefiles and every conceivable way
that it installs files onto my system that it has, so anything that I
wrote to parse the output I would not rely on anyway, so it's not
worth trying. Makefiles and the whole system is sort of a black art to
me. I can usually figure out what's wrong if something is wrong, like
if I'm missing a library or something, but hell if I could put that
system together myself.

> Come to that, the real hate then would be toolkits that can't sort this
> out for you automatically: if the installer adds X, Y, and Z, it should
> at least preserve a log of that somewhere so that, if it can't provide a
> tool to remove X, Y, and Z for you, you can at least do so manually.

This is what my rant is all about. make install that doesn't keep
track for a make uninstall. There are some packages that do that, to
be fair, but a lot of them don't. And being fair is not what this
board is all about. It should just be automatic. Yeah, I know, that's
asking too much.
There's stuff above here

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