Re: Software/HD ecology

[Lee Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>]

>>>>> "Ajanta" == Ajanta  <ajanta@no.spam> writes:

    Ajanta> I wasn't aware of this and will have to look into
    Ajanta> it. However, unless a program's creators cooperate, I
    Ajanta> can't visualize how stow would prevent a program from
    Ajanta> installing files all over the place leaving you with no
    Ajanta> way to uninstall?

Why in  the first place  would the program  NEED to install  files all
over the place?

Unix  is  well  designed.  Most  (if  not  all)  GNU programs  can  be
configured   to   be   installed   anywhere  (usually   defaulted   to
/usr/local/foobar) and  run off there  directly.  There is no  need to
install files every here and  there.  That another popular inferior OS
does it doesn't mean Unix has to use the same approach.

To uninstall  the application,  simply "rm -rf  /usr/local/foobar" and
you're done!


You may have PATH or paths  to libraries in mind.  Unix has an elegant
tool: symbolic  links.  That other  popular inferior OS tried  to copy
this feature, but  didn't do it properly.  Short-cuts  simply a broken
way  of implementing  symlinks.  With  symlinks,  we place  a link  in
/usr/bin   or  /usr/local/bin   to   point  to   the  executables   in
/usr/local/foobar.  Similarly  for libraries.  After  uninstalling the
program, these  symlinks would become dangling and  hence unusable.  A
simple "find / -lname  "/usr/local/foobar/*" |xargs rm -f" would clean
them.


Anyway, nowadays,  people almost always use package  managers, such as
RPM in RedHat  and SuSE.  These are software systems  to keep track of
installed  files.  They  provide an  easy way  to  uninstall packages,
keeping an eye on the package dependencies.



    Ajanta> A practical problem is that except perhaps to an insider
    Ajanta> most names are unintuitive. If a file is named emacs-foo
    Ajanta> or foo.el you can guess what it is but a name like
    Ajanta> zuplibfoo (this is hypothetical, but most unix names have
    Ajanta> similar transparency) doesn't tell you which of the
    Ajanta> hundreds of packages it might belong to. So you can't even
    Ajanta> try to uninstall everything manually.

That explains why the issue you  raised out is a non-problem for Unix.
Unix  has been  supporting  long file  names  for a  long time.   Unix
programmers tend to use more verbose and descriptive filenames, rather
than  thinks like  PROGRA~1.   So, we  normally  don't such  problems.
Moreover, as  mentioned above, we tend  to put files of  each app into
its own  directory and then  install symlinks in /usr/bin,  instead of
sprinkling files here and there.


-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     李守敦(Big5)                    ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ) 

E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee