Re: FEATURE REQUEST: make uninstall should delete empty directories.

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Daniel Reed wrote:

> On 2004-03-02T08:34-0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> ) On Mon, 1 Mar 2004, Hans Deragon wrote:
> ) >    When performing a "make uninstall", I notice that it only deletes the 
> files,
> ) > not the empty directories.  It would be nice that after removing a file, 
> it
> ) > removes all the empty directories recursively.  For example:
> ) If a package supports creating the directory /usr/local (as Automake
> ) does by default) should this directory be recursively removed if a
> ) package is uninstalled?
>
> Not if it is non-empty after everything subordinate to it installed as part
> of the package has been removed.

The reason why I mentioned /usr/local is because it is a shared
directory.  I could also have mentioned /usr.  While it seems nice for
a package to 100% clean-up after itself, a bug could cause the package
uninstall to accidentally remove the operating system.

It is not always easy to see if a directory is empty. For example,
when NFS is being used, sometimes .nfs files are created in the
directories, so the directory is not really empty.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
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http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen