lists Guillot wrote:
[...] I often install packages from source with ./configure, make, make install. Sometimes I'm not happy with the software for whatever reason and I want to get rid of it. I don't actually know how to do this, till now I've always done make clean or make distclean if available, and then deleted the sources.
This procedure does *not* uninstall the software.
But I installed something the other day that messed up something else, and uninstalling in this manner did not fix the problem. So how does one really fully undo what is done by ./configure, make, make install?
Unless the Makefile provides an "uninstall" target, there is no way to uninstall software that has been installed with "make install". On a system based on RPM package format, you should only install RPM packages and nothing else. Otherwise, the consistency of your RPM database is no longer guaranteed.
[...] So I "uninstalled" iconv as mentioned above, but the problem didn't go away. to my surprise I found that /usr/local/bin/iconv was still there. If I delete it the problem is solved, so that's ok. The question is that I thought make clean would have got rid of it, and now I wonder what other junk is left lying around from other source packages I've installed and "removed".
"make clean" or "make distclean" cleans up the source/build directory. These Makefile targets do not remove anything that has already been installed.
How does one really uninstall? How do you know if everything's been removed?
You should only use RPM packages - these packages can be installed and uninstalled without problems. Either get a ready-to-use RPM package from a repository, or build an RPM package on your system, or (at least) use checkinstall to build an RPM package (instead of using "make install"). Anything else will sooner or later screw up your system. Cheers, Th. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org