I've been wondering about this since I started running Linux.
If I simply install software using an RPM and I still have this RPM once I decide to uninstall it, it's simple.

But what if the software wasn't installed from an RPM but from a tarball? And what if I don't remember what it was installed with? How do I remove software that I do not use anymore? As far as I can tell I should do something I always told people not to do in Windows and that is remove the directories containing the software. Isn't there some sort of "Add/Remove Programs" kind of thing? Or at least something that keeps track of where files go, so I can remove the right files manually without leaving any old unused stuff behind?

Then there's another thing I'm wondering about. My system is becoming kind of a mess because I tried out a lot of software to see what I liked best (it's my first install). What if I should decide to do a clean install? Are there things besides /etc, /home and the kernel config I definitely shouldn't forget to backup?

I guess I've asked enough questions for one post

RPMs, of course are databased in some file and you've got the happy little uninstall flag -r I think...

From source isn't as easy. You could track down all the binaries, the man pages and libraries... but there's really not anything that manages programs installed from source very well, hence the various package managers: apt-get, RPM, deselect, pkg-select and the like. The source packages themselves might have a really helpful "make uninstall" that might even work if you just find the same version of the source package, unpack it and run it without ever having run a 'make', but for the most part there isn't an easy solution to package maintenance unless you go whole hog with whichever distro's package manager.

Cheers,

Finegan