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At some point hitherto, David Kramer hath spake thusly:
> Here's my big problem with tarballs:
> there's almost never a 
> 	make uninstall

I agree, but this isn't really that hard for the user to do either,
*if* you remember to do it at install time:

  # touch marker_file
  # make install
  # find / -newer marker_file -type f -exec rm {} \;
  # find / -newer marker_file -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;

Now your stuff is uninstalled.  The trick of course, is remembering to
make your marker file, and later remembering where it is.  Neither of
which I ever seem to manage.  ;-)

Note this is probably not the best way to do this; better to make a
list of the files and review them carefully to make sure you won't
still need them after uninstalling.  Then, after eliminating anything
you are sure you want to keep, use sed to turn your list into a shell
script by sticking appropriate rm commands in front of the file names.
Or something like that...

I agree with Chris's follow-up to your message though: The other major
drawback to installing software this way is that it's not terribly
scalable.  You would not want to compile your software for each
machine you need to use it with, if you have to maintain 100, 1000, or
10,000 workstations.

There are several solutions to this, each of which has their own
benefits and drawbacks.  One is to maintain an NFS export with all of
the software you'll need, and compile the software to be installed on
it.  The benefit here is whatever benefits you get from compiling your
own software.  

Another solution is to use a package manager.  The benefit here is
that it requires no compiling, and it's easier to automate updates
than it would be with tarballs.  With debian, the OS provides a means
to do it, making it trivial to automate updates.  With RPM-based
systems, using a little bit of scripting magic, it's almost as easy
as with debian.  

The drawbacks to both of these are that it's hard to do either,
without maintaining a standard platform (hardware and base OS).  Not
impossible, but hard.  The difficulties, if not obvious, are left as
an exercise for the reader to figure out... ;-)

The additional drawback to the package manager solution is that it
fails whenever you need a piece of software for which no package
exists for your chosen platform.

Hey, everything in life is a tradeoff...  =8^)

- -- 
Derek Martin               ddm@pizzashack.org    
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