[Techtalk] package hell

[Wim De Smet]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 2:55 PM, Elwing <elwing at elwing.org> wrote:
>  On May 7, 2008, at 1:55 AM, Maria McKinley wrote:
>  >
>  > Since there is no actual xemacs in lenny (debian testing), I tried to
>  > compile xemacs myself, and have now have a half-working xemacs. I
>  > would
>  > like to uninstall the package, but I'm really not sure how to do this.
>  > The xemacs site claims that there is a pkginfo/MANIFEST.pkgname file
>  > that has a list of all of the files, but I don't have that. I think
>  > that
>  > must be for pre-compiled packages.

If you installed from source with a "make install" and you still have
that source directory chances are "make uninstall" will do it for you.
If not it might come down to hunting down the files yourself.  To make
that easier, get the original source you compiled, but now configure
it with the --prefix options to install it somewhere in a temporary
directory. Simply go over what files that creates in your temp
directory and delete all of those. (or carefully edit the list of
files it uses for make uninstall and then run make uninstall)

>  How to get rid of xemacs, I can't really help you with, but there used
>  to be a script that you could call with make install that would record
>  all of the files that were installed (and I can't find it on Google to
>  save my life).  You might also want to check if there's a debian
>  directory, and you can create a .deb file from the source you have and
>  install that.

I believe you mean checkinstall, from the description:
 CheckInstall keeps track of all the files created or
 modified by your installation script ("make install"
 "make install_modules", "setup", etc), builds a
 standard binary package and installs it in your
 system giving you the ability to uninstall it with your
 distribution's standard package management utilities.

greets,
Wim