ruhroh

[Aravind Gottipati]

sometime around Sun, Jul 13, 2003 at 12:50:46PM -0500
Gerald Combs wrote:
> 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.

There is a GNU tool called stow that makes this a little easier.  You
typically install the new software into a directory under
/usr/local/stow.  Then installed software looks like this at this point.

/usr/local/stow/pkg/etc/blah
/usr/local/stow/pkg/doc/blahblah
/usr/local/stow/pkg/bin/pkg_bin
 
Then you stow this package and this creates the corresponding symlinks
from /usr/local to your package.  Uninstalling the package is really
simple at this point, you simply unstow (remove the symlinks).  If you
want to remove this package, this method is also usually cleaner than
make uninstall (make uninstall sometimes tends to leave junk behind,
depending on the software).  Most programs are well behaved when
installed like this.

In your case you could run a make -n install and see what it does and
manually remove stuff based on that.  I think thats your best bet at
this point.

HTH,

Aravind.

-- 
Let me put it this way: today is going to be a learning experience
                                           -- Anonymous
                                             (seen on slashdot)