On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 12:57:01PM -0500, Edmund Lian wrote: > > >>Ahem, that's "a builit-in uninstall", not "AI built-in uninstall"<< > > But AI is not completely off the mark. I thought you were alluding to the > general difficulty of doing an uninstall. I've seen two different solutions > to the problem of figuring out what was installed in the first place, and > neither seems perfect. E.g., one solution re-runs the install script to see > what changes were made, but this presumes that a re-install does exact what > the original install did. Seems like the use of install log file to > deinstall (and prevent re-installs without a deinstall first) is the best > way to go, but this doesn't seem to be the distutils way to do things...
It seems like any package that can install itself should uninstall itself too. That's just being good-neighborly on the computer, and not assuming "I am the one important program, I have no bugs, and nobody would ever want to uninstall me. Bow to the great program!" I think distutils needs a 'python setup.py uninstall' option, and if the distutils team is unwilling to put one in centrally, we should provide it for Webware at least. I've looked at this a bit for Cheetah and WebwareExperimental, but haven't researched it much yet. All the uninstall routine needs to do is to delete the files/directories *it* created. The user is responsible for any custom files he created (e.g., MakeAppWorkDir files, webserver configuration file). Uninstall means uninstall, so it can just blindly delete the files. If the user is afraid uninstalling Webware will stomp on some other program in the same directory, he shouldn't run uninstall. (And why did he install another program into Webware's directory anyway?) If a file or directory doesn't exist, ignore it--we don't care why it's missing. If a directory can't be deleted coz it's not empty, report that to the user and continue. -- -Mike (Iron) Orr, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (if mail problems: [EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://iron.cx/ English * Esperanto * Russkiy * Deutsch * Espan~ol _______________________________________________ Webware-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webware-discuss
