I have built and installed many packages from source, but am afraid I am almost completely ignorant as to how to best upgrade them...I have done many searches and really don't find much (which makes me think...). I will gratefully accept links to how-to's or other docs. RPM makes this easy, but there are certain packages I must build... on a similar note, what is the procedure to uninstall a package built from source?

A.L.

I use this neat little program called InstallWatch to keep track of everything a package installs. Here's a link to the latest tarball http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/check...h-0.6.3.tar.gz. It is also used by a program called CheckInstall (IIRC) that will allow you to create rpm, deb, and tgz's of what you build.

I run a CLFS box most of the time (no package manager) and use InstallWatch all by itself to create log files in /var/log/CBLFS. I then have a couple of homegrown scripts. One cleans up the InstallWatch generated file and the other uses this information to remove all the files if I want. This approach doesn't take care of dependencies. I use an OOo spreadsheet for that!

Upgrading depends on the scope of the upgrade, IMO. "Big" upgrades like GNOME-2.14 to GNOME-2.16 requires a different strategy than upgrading appres-1.0.0 to appres-1.0.1. I install GNOME-2.14 in /opt/gnome-2.14 and make /opt/gnome a symlink to that directory. GNOME-2.16 then goes into /opt/gnome-2.16 and the symlink is changed. With my high-tech spreadsheet-based dependency tracker, I can figure out what apps depend on GNOME components and then rebuild them against the new GNOME stuff. Usually, I just wait until it pukes and then think, "Oh, yeah, I've got a new version of GNOME."

As for uninstalling, check the readme - yes all of them. Hopefully the makefile has a stanza(s) to do cleanup/delete. And of course they're all (potentially) different.

Most packages will also come with an UPGRADE file in the tarball (or something similar). I've found some of these to be very useful through to a waste of electricity in displaying

Would you share your scripts? And thanks for the excellent answer.

Oh, I read the README for checkinstall and am a little unclear... does it actually incorporate installwatch in it's code or does installwatch need to be installed seperately?

-AL

I don't use CheckInstall, so I really don't know how it uses InstallWatch.

Here is a tarball with my scripts...
http://webpages.charter.net/weibullg...ch-0.2.tar.bz2

Thanks for sharing this.

-AL