Re: Software/HD ecology

[Tribhuvan <loka@rcn.com>]

Lee wrote:
 > make install 2>&1 >install.log

Redirecting the output to a log file is useful, and
should be a standard practice, but as I indicated in
an earlier post, only a very small portion of this output
indicates the copy operations. In particular, the bin,
lib, man, share portions of an installation. (/etc and
/var stuff I don't think should be removed automatically
during an uninstall because these locations should contain
your custom configuration files and log files which may be
useful later). An install prefix like
--prefix=/usr/local/package
would be problematic for production environments as there
are security and sanity issues that prevent us from mixing
various types of files and directories on any disk partition.

 > ...a "make installed_file_list"...would be very helpful.
 > Or a "make uninstall.sh"...undoing whatever "make install" has done.

I was originally thinking of capturing/filtering the output of
"make install", but you may be on to something much more practical.

After doing "make", all of the instructions are prepared
for "make install". The same set of instructions could be
used for a "make installed" (<- truncated name) to generate
an "installed_file_list". Once this little database is created,
a relatively simple shell script could perform something like:

# make installed > /var/gnu/package-foo.installed_list.log
# sh uninstall.sh < /var/gnu/package-foo.installed_list.log
...removing package-foo
remove all pkg-foo files from /opt/sfw/bin [y|n|?]:
remove all pkg-foo files from /opt/sfw/etc [y|n|?]:
...and so on.

only, if "uninstall.sh" were a standardized item (and) not
something that might inadvertantly get deleted along with
the source tree.