distutils uninstall

[Rick Muller]

I've been trying to figure out whether there are any plans to add an
"uninstall" feature to the Python distutils. Googling has found
several people posting the same question, but, to the best of my
knowledge, no answers.

Can anyone tell me whether this has been proposed before? Thanks in
advance.

[Skip Montanaro]

Re: distutils uninstall


Rick> I've been trying to figure out whether there are any plans to add
Rick> an "uninstall" feature to the Python distutils. Googling has found
Rick> several people posting the same question, but, to the best of my
Rick> knowledge, no answers.

This has been proposed before. It's not a trivial problem though.
Distutils would need to record all the files and directories it creates
during installation and carefully remove stuff during the uninstall process
(do things "backwards" , not remove directories which still contain files,
etc). That wouldn't be foolproof though, because unlike packaging systems
such as Red Hat's RPM, you don't have a full system picture. What if your
distutils-installed package provides a new version of /etc/magic? If you
uninstall it, /etc/magic would be deleted, since distutils couldn't tell
that /etc/magic was actually used by many other parts of the system.

Skip

[Martin v. Löwis]

Re: distutils uninstall

Rick Muller wrote:[color=blue]
> I've been trying to figure out whether there are any plans to add an
> "uninstall" feature to the Python distutils. Googling has found
> several people posting the same question, but, to the best of my
> knowledge, no answers.[/color]

As Skip explains: no. Instead, use a bdist_ command, then use the
uninstall mechanism of the binary packaging technology (e.g. wininst,
rpm).

There are some complaints that bdist-generated packages don't properly
uninstall either (e.g. may not remove directories properly);
contributions are welcome.

Regards,
Martin

[Rick Muller]

Re: distutils uninstall

Skip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com > wrote in message news:<mailman.5 98.1074702856.1 2720.python-list@python.org >...[color=blue]
> Rick> I've been trying to figure out whether there are any plans to add
> Rick> an "uninstall" feature to the Python distutils. Googling has found
> Rick> several people posting the same question, but, to the best of my
> Rick> knowledge, no answers.
>
> This has been proposed before. It's not a trivial problem though.
> Distutils would need to record all the files and directories it creates
> during installation and carefully remove stuff during the uninstall process
> (do things "backwards" , not remove directories which still contain files,
> etc). That wouldn't be foolproof though, because unlike packaging systems
> such as Red Hat's RPM, you don't have a full system picture. What if your
> distutils-installed package provides a new version of /etc/magic? If you
> uninstall it, /etc/magic would be deleted, since distutils couldn't tell
> that /etc/magic was actually used by many other parts of the system.
>
> Skip[/color]

Thanks for the reply, Skip.

I actually had a simpler case in mind, that you go to the directory
from which you installed the software, and typed 'setup.py uninstall',
since the setup.py script should be able to determine which files it
originally installed, and remove them.

Certainly not foolproof, but it may be useful all the same.