Unbuilding from Source ;)

[Audax321]

Hello,

I've only built from source a few times before as I normally use RPM but I'm getting sick of trying to track down RPMs. So I was just wondering, isn't building from source messy? I mean, what happens when you need to uninstall the program? Or is there a way to cleanly uninstall?

Thanks...

[dylunio]

I know with some source packs you can state

make uninstall

instaed of

make install

dylunio

[Audax321]

Is there a way to tell if that make uninstall option is available before you make install?

And you have to keep the configured source around to uninstall at a later time, right?

[sether]

Is there a way to tell if that make uninstall option is available before you make install?

read the file README or INSTALL that comes in the directory with the source.

[Stalin]

You could also try some source-based package management tool, such as spk ( http://spk.sourceforge.net ).

[valan]

IMO installing pre built packages is what's messy. Building from source gives you the options to customize how it is built and where it installs to, installing a RPM gives you none of that (or very few in some cases). Mostly this is accomplished by passing options to configure, but sometimes editing the Makefile a little bit is what it takes. Not all options have a 'make uninstall', but you can find out with the command 'make -n uninstall'. The -n options means print everything, but don't actually do it, so if it does some stuff at least you know it works. Otherwise, you'll have to delete everything manually, check 'make -n install' to see where it puts everything, these are what must be deleted.

[Scourge]

I compile my programs like this:

./configure
make
checkinstall -S -y

Somebody sayd me that if you do packages from programs what are made of sources you can uninstall them with any pgkmanager.

(That's why checkinstall instead of make install)

[Stormblazer]

Or in the case of Gentoo's portage system, it takes care of the cleanup for you- saves loads of time.