Uninstalling a Linux App
 

After creating a HelloWorld with KDE I wonder what kind of surgery is necessary to UNinstall the application.

No Windows style registry here that I can see. Just wipe out the place where all the files went? Like when I did > configure prefix=/oink just destroy anything under /oink?

That simple?

usually just delete directory but links and may be a temp .app folder may still exist in your home directory

If you still have the source directory you compiled from, generally 'make uninstall' will do the job neatly.

I was hoping that if one kept the source directory that should do the trick. A couple of questions about this...

Is it a common practice to keep those archived on the server for the purposes of uninstalling? What if you have deleted the original source you used to build the application, does that mean it can't uninstall? I understand that one might configure with different options, but I would be interested if it could at least do a basic uninstall of the base parts of the package. Or perhaps it would just be easier to then recompile and install the app over itself and then do a make uninstall? Mainly I am concerned with all the edits it makes to various scripts, like rc.d stuff and halt and what not.

For something more than a casual workstation I would say its more common to build packages that can be used by your distro's package manager from source rather than just do a `make install`.

If you kept the original source that you compiled, then the options you used would be stored and `make uninstall` would know which files to delete unless of course you did a `make clean` beforehand. Also remember quite a few programs' Makefiles don't include functionality to do a `make uninstall`, apache being a good example.

Recompiling the source and reinstalling may or may not overwrite configuration files, depends on the developers. Ideally no configuration files would be overwritten and the new ones would be named <config file>.new but this doesn't always happen.

If I understand correctly you are suggesting that if I am using Red Hat that I should create an RPM out of the source? Is that something that I would run through the package manager, or an argument I would use when compiling or making the application?

And thanks for the info on best practices...

Yes!

I assume redhat rpm package would have some tools to help you build your own rpm packages. You'll have to search google for a tutorial on how to build them, I've never built an rpm package, I use slackware so build slackware packages when required