[sclug] Keeping track of source installations

[Simon Heywood]

On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 08:04:40PM +0200, erik.chakravarty at accenture.com wrote:
> For you DEBIAN_FANS out there... (I hope somebody gets that joke)

Sorry, lost on me. ;-)

> "make install" throws binaries and libraries all over your filesystem
> with no way of cleaning everything up again in 6 months time. Is there a
> convenient way of keeping track of what non-debianized packages you have
> installed?

Well, according to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, which Debian
sticks to pretty well, this is what /usr/local is for - things added by
the local administrator. In fact, most source tarballs have build
scripts that install stuff in /usr/local by default. The exception, of
course, is configuration files, which need to go in /etc. Also bear in
mind that configure scripts generally have some odd non-FHS defaults.

When you want to clean things up, simply remove stuff from /usr/local
and find the corresponding config. files in /etc. And yes, this will
prove interesting if you don't want to get rid of everything in
/usr/local, but then that's what package mangement is for. ;-)

S.