Re: [gthumb-list] make uninstall

[Paolo Bacchilega <paolo bacchilega libero it>]

Il 12/05/2012 01:35, Ronald F. Guilmette ha scritto:
> Just one other small point about the gthumb Makefiles...
>
> In an ideal Universe, doing `make uninstall' would totally and completely
> un-do everything that had been done as a result of `make install'... well...
> anyway, at least the stuff that affected the target install directory.
>
> As I was working on gthumb recently, I didnt' want to disturb anything else
> on my system with my local&  personal ``experimental'' builds, so I
> arranged to install gthumb in its' own special directory, /usr/local/hacked.
>
> Just now, I tried doing `make uninstall' of gthumb to see what, if anything
> might get left over after `make install' and then `make uninstall'
>
> The listing of all of the leftovers is attached below.  (These are all
> relative to /usr/local/hacked, aka my install prefix.)
>
> The vast majority of everything in this list are directories, but there were
> some regular files left behind also, specifically all of the various gthumb.mo
> files.
>
> In the case of all of the install directories, obviously those ones that
> are package-specific, like share/gthumb (and everything below that) should,
> I think, be removed by the Makefile uninstall target.  It could be argued,
> I suppose that the higher-level non-package-specific directories (which
> might be used in common by many packages) such as bin lib, include, and etc
> should not be deleted by `make uninstall' however my personal view is that
> an effort should be made to remove even those directories (after everything
> gthumb-specific below them has been removed) and that the effort should
> consist of the obvious, i.e. `-rmdir', i.e. these directories should be
> deleted if and only if they are empty, and if they are non-empty at the
> time this is attempted, then that ``error'' should be silently ignored
> (because the directories in question are probably being used by other
> installed packages).
>
> I have not coded up any patches to the relevant Makefile.am files, or
> anything else that might be needed to make all of the additional file
> and directory deletions I am proposing herein happen.  I will however
> be happy to do so upon request from Paolo.

As a rule of thumb I just look at other GNOME project Makefile.am files 
to see how they use it, and I don't see commands to delete the 
directories there, so either it is supposed to work this way or there is 
some problem with Automake on FreeBSD or it's an Automake bug :)

About the .mo files, I cannot reproduce the problem here they are 
correctly deleted after an 'uninstall', maybe another FreeBSD specific bug?

- Paolo