Hi, I have a related question; is there no "uninstall" (not talking about rpms)? A lot of the apps I have installed (./configure;make;make install) have a "make uninstall", but that means that you have to untar/gunzip the package again if/when you want to uninstall it; Has there ever been any thoughts on having some kind of flat file/db that stores all of a program's associated files (and if one/many of those files was shared/dl, then kept track of how many apps are associated with them), for the eventuality that someone decides they want to remove the app, and all traces? If there is, where/what is it? and if there isn't, is this not something that would be beneficial for system maintenace? i.e. if you end up removing an app, that when untarred/gunzipped took up 50MB (for example), but are only able to find (for sure) 35-40MB of that app's associated files, and you do this several times (which is typical/reasonable IMO), then you are wasting a LOT of hd space over time, and quite possible causing future dependency issues/conflicts. If there is NOT such an utility, and enough of the distros would be interested or the group that controls the RPM spec, I would be very willing/happy to start coding such an app in perl (or C, but for this, I would think perl is more suited); (n.b. I have NO idea if it would have to have anything to do with the distros/RPM group, so if anyone knows what would be the best way of going about it, please let me know). Thanks, David Charles On 18 Sep 2001, Dave Sherman wrote: > On Tue, 2001-09-18 at 04:16, Franki wrote: > > I think two other things would help,. a gui and console tool that does smart > > tarball installs and updates the rpm database for that app, and one that can > > get dependencies for you,, (goes to a mandrake update site list...etc etc. > > or asks for the CD, or both) preferably the same app. > > Debian has apt-get, which does exactly this. Rpm still doesn't do it, > although rpmdrake (front-end to grpmi, which actually does the work) > does a decent job of it. But for packages which Mandrake does not > create, rpmdrake will do you no good :-( > > > and a self extracting tarball, (sort of like winzips self extracting file,, > > a new tarball format that can have a shell or perl script wrapper around the > > actual tarfile that untars and starts the install for you.. (then updates > > the RPM databse...downloads dependencies etc etc....) even if it was 10% > > bigger then a standard tarball, people would go for it because of the ease > > of install and removal and "smart installing" features, [snip] > > As a matter of fact, I have seen such a beast. Nessus (www.nessus.org) > comes in a self-installing shell script. Just download and run nessus.sh > (or whatever it was called), and the script will run, which actually > unzips and untars the file, then checks dependencies, configures, > compiles, and installs. At the beginning, it asks for the root password, > so it can complete the install later on. It is very slick. > > Dave >
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