Re: Purging mozilla
On 21/10/99 David Jardine wrote: ...wouldn't it be nicer if I knew what the deleted program had left on my system? well most programs do not run as root, this means that its literally impossible for the program to spew crap all over the filesystem after installation (unlike some other OSes *cough* macos windoze *ahem*) when you are logged in as a ordinary user the programs you run have the same privileges you do (except for a very small minority that require an extra privilege or two, but those do not spew crap where they shouldn't) and thus CANNOT write anywhere except /home/you /tmp and /var/tmp the tmps are cleaned up automatically I believe with the boot scripts and cron jobs. I suspect you are coming from win* or macos and are used to crappy things like `self repair' read randomly spew files all over the place, which makes true deinstallation impossible. generally you can expect alot of software to install a configuration file or directory in the user's home but its up to the user to keep track of that and clean up as needed. Best Regards, Ethan Benson To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/
Re: Purging mozilla
On Wed, Oct 20, 1999 at 10:43:37PM -0800, Ethan Benson wrote: On 20/10/99 David Jardine wrote: It appears that mozilla creates a subdirectory in the user's home directory with the user's name, eg /home/fred/fred. I ran dpkg --purge mozilla which according to my understanding of the manpages should eliminate all traces of its existence - it didn't say that exactly, but this seemed the most radical option. However, the directories are still there, so: Should I have done it another way? Has mozilla left any other droppings on my system? If there is no other way to clean up, shouldn't there be? dpkg will not go into user's home directories and start removing stuff, that would just be plain rude! :-) Well, yes, I take your point, but... there is probably nothing left of mozzilla except for the files in anyones home directory who used it, but those files belong to the user so it is up to them to delete them. (there may be data they want to keep, bookmarks for instance.) ...wouldn't it be nicer if I knew what the deleted program had left on my system? now if you are the only user then your the only one with these files rm -rf fred should take care of it. (just make sure you point to the right fred :-) ) I must point out that this causes me no real problems. I'm still at a very experimental stage with debian and regularly reinstall the whole thing. Which raises another question: Is it legitimate for me to put you kind folks to the trouble of helping me with my problems when nothing is really critical? Thanks for your help. David Ethan Benson OpenPGP encrypted mail accepted. To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/ Key FingerPrint: 371A 7416 5D39 CF2D 9366 8AF6 0139 54F5 3EBD 0FE6 RSA Key FingerPrint: DE8B 74D0 79F1 6176 9AF5 120F 47AD 9B0A
Purging mozilla
It appears that mozilla creates a subdirectory in the user's home directory with the user's name, eg /home/fred/fred. I ran dpkg --purge mozilla which according to my understanding of the manpages should eliminate all traces of its existence - it didn't say that exactly, but this seemed the most radical option. However, the directories are still there, so: Should I have done it another way? Has mozilla left any other droppings on my system? If there is no other way to clean up, shouldn't there be? TIA, David
Re: Purging mozilla
On Wed, Oct 20, 1999 at 11:54:16PM +0200, David Jardine wrote:
It appears that mozilla creates a subdirectory in the user's home
directory with the user's name, eg /home/fred/fred. I ran
dpkg --purge mozilla which according to my understanding of the
manpages should eliminate all traces of its existence - it didn't
say that exactly, but this seemed the most radical option.
However, the directories are still there, so:
Should I have done it another way?
Has mozilla left any other droppings on my system?
If there is no other way to clean up, shouldn't there be?
dpkg has no way of knowing about files the program creates after
installation, so it can't remove them. That means that any config files
which are created and stuck in your $HOME are going to stay there even
when you remove the package that created them...
If you take a look in /var/lib/dpkg/info/, the *.list files tell dpkg
what files belong to what package, and therefore, what files dpkg can
remove when removing the associated package.
Aside from the actual difficulties of knowing about files created by a
package after installation, I can think of plenty of reasons why having
dpkg remove such files would be really evil.i It *could* be done, though
- if the package maintainer, for example, made the {pre,post}rm scripts
look for known files and kill them (e.g. the script for mozilla could
search the /home of every user for it's .mozilla dir or something).
--
[ Matthew Gregan ] [ GPG ID: B63A1E95 ] [ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ]
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