[Techtalk] Chicken

Telsa Gwynne hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk
Fri Nov 15 11:11:38 EST 2002


On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 10:29:12PM -0500 or thereabouts, Andrew wrote:
> Hi All,
> 	I was about to update my Aspell and read that an uninstall was
> recomemded. Well it would be my first and I thought it better to lean on
> you all first.
> 
> 	Aspell and pspell are in /usr/share/foo  and  /usr/lib    and  
> /usr/share/doc
> 
>  	When 'doing" uninstall which directory is in done from in this
> instance.
> 
> 	Is it likely it will need additional cleaning up and if so 
> what should I *not remove*? 

Are you using a package-management system? rpm, dpkg, portage? 
Or did you install aspell from tarballs? 

Generally, if you install from tarballs, things will go into 
/usr/local/ rather than into /usr/. They will only end up there
if you told it something like "./configure --prefix=/usr" before
you ran "make" and "make install". 

Unless you rememver that you installed from a tarball and specifically
told it to install into /usr, I think you probably have a package 
management system which will remove it for you. 

If "rpm -q aspell" returns a result like "aspell-0.33.7-1" then
it came as an rpm and you want "rpm --erase aspell".

If "dpkg -l aspell" returns a result like.. oh dear, I forget. Well,
something other than an error.. then it came as a deb and you want
either "dpkg -r aspell" or "dpkg --purge aspell" (the latter removes
any config files it had too). 

I have no clue how portage works so I hope you're not using Gentoo :) 

Finally, if it really did come from a tarball, you need to find the 
directory you unpacked it into and ran "./configure" in. This is 
generally in the top-level directory of the unpacked tarball. 
There will be a Makefile in there. That has the targets make knows 
about. Packagers and programmers have to care about more targets 
than just "make all"; they often want "make distclean", "make clean" 
and so on. And they write rules for such things in the Makefile. In 
with all these, you must hope there is an "uninstall" target in the 
Makefile.

Having discovered that "make uninstall" is in fact not universal,
these days I actually do check it exists before installing from a 
tarball. 

"make uninstall" in the directory you installed it from (as root, 
probably) should work. 

If you removed all the sources to save on space, you're stuck. 
I think perhaps you might be able to find the tarball of the old
version, unpack it, do ./configure (and use exactly the same 
configure options), and then "make uninstall", but this paragraph
is utter guesswork.

Telsa



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