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

[Bernd Jendrissek]

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On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 09:18:49AM -0500, Hans Deragon wrote:
> Eric Siegerman wrote:
> >On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 08:34:19AM -0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
[...]
> What if we reckognize some directories as to be never deleted?  For 
> instance, /, /usr/bin, /usr/local, /var, /tmp, /bin, /sbin, /usr/share, and 
> many others would never be deleted, even if empty.  Others not in the list 
> would be.  This would be easy to implement.

I'd rather *tell* a computer what it *must* do, rather than letting it
guess (wrong, likely).

> This issue is that I do not find it clean when I install a package in a 
> special directory using --prefix, and then find all the directories still 
> there after uninstalling it.
> 
> Note that I am not 100% backing up my own idea, since I do reckognize that 
> their might be some unexpected consequences of what I am proposing.  But I 
> would like for the discussion to continue so that we either convince 
> ourselves that it is a bad idea, or maybe not.

$(DESTDIR) also complicates the mapping between "we created it" and "we
own it".

> >Note that this issue is orthogonal to the question of creating a
> >standalone uninstall script, which I actually find very
> >appealing.
> 
> Thanks for the support for my other idea.  You are right, it is orthogonal 
> to the other and this is why I created two distinct emails.

A standalone uninstall script sounds like a nice idea indeed.
Unfortunately, though, I pull more of my hair out over packages which
don't use automake *at all* (no DESTDIR support is my pet peeve), than
over imperfections in the autotools.

> >[1] By contrast, things like RPM *do* have enough information: if
> >    a directory is (or becomes) empty during uninstall, it should
> >    be removed iff it is mentioned in the RPM spec file.  Note
> >    that the spec file is (intended to be) hand-written, or at
> >    least hand-tuned; so decisions about which directories to
> >    list in it are made by a human, not by code.
> 
> Would there be a way to record this information?  Maybe in the uninstall 
> script I suggest?  If the package created the directory, it would record 
> this fact in the uninstall script.

GCC:
lib_SUBDIRS = gcc-lib

automake:
data_SUBDIRS = aclocal-1.8 automake-1.8 aclocal

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