ruhroh

[Brian Kelsay]

Gerald Combs wrote:

> On Sun, 13 Jul 2003, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

>>Yeah.  Lovely, arrogant developers.  "Why would anybody EVERN uninsall our 
>>precious product?"

> 
> 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.
> 

Live and learn I guess.  Sounds like Gerald has done a bit of this.
Brian