Re: Software/HD ecology

[Fredrik Staxeng <fstx+u@update.uu.se>]

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:

>Those seem like pretty reasonable ideas; in more concrete form, perhaps
>they could be added to the GNU programming standards or something.

I think that right thing is a gnu-install program. This would be
called from install targets in the makefiles. It would log the
files installed, and then you could do gnu-uninstall emacs.

It could make backups of any files overwritten, allow only files 
owned by this package to be overwritten, collect checksums so
that modified files can be identified, generate file lists for
binary distributions.

It should support files, directories and symlinks. It could support
postactions such as running makewhatis after a man page is installed.
If it setuid-safe one could make two users, gnubin and gnusource,
and use file protections to verify that the installation action behaves.

The configure scripts should already be looking for BSD install,
and use that for installing the all the files. The configure script
is generated by autoconf, which gives a single point for introducing
this with a minimum of effort for the maintainers of GNU packages.

I think that undo logic has to be derived automatically. Manually
writing things like that too error-prone, especially if they need 
ongoing maintenance.

-- 
Fredrik Stax\"ang | rot13: sfgk@hcqngr.hh.fr