ruhroh

[Gerald Combs]

On Sun, 13 Jul 2003, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> Yeah.  Lovely, arrogant developers.  "Why would anybody EVERN uninsall our 
> precious product?"
> 
> I've heard it suggested that you re-run the make/install and capture the 
> output, then analyse it to see what it actually did to your system.  There's 
> probably a way to automate this, but it would probably work best if it was 
> the original make/install that was captured.

Assuming the developer uses autoconf or something similar you can run
"./configure --prefix=/some/far/off/directory".  In theory, the package
will be installed in its own little self-contained directory that you can
remove at your leisure.  Provided the developer hasn't hard-coded an
install path, e.g. forcing the config file to live in /etc, of course.

I do this on a lot of systems I run.  For example, Apache gets installed
in /usr/local/apache-<version>.  Upgrading is a snap - migrate the config,
stop the old daemon, and start the new one.

More importantly, I can back off to the old version in a flash if things
go all explody.