Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool: 14.4 Uninstall

| ## 14.4 Uninstall As if things arent confusing enough, there is still one more major installation-related feature which we haven't mentioned: uninstall. Automake adds an `uninstall` target to your ``Makefile'` which does the reverse of `install`: it deletes the newly installed package. Unlike `install`, there is no `uninstall-data` or `uninstall-exec`; while possible in theory we don't think this would be useful enough to actually use. Like `install`, you can write `uninstall-local` or `uninstall-hook` rules. In our experience, `uninstall` is not a very useful feature. Automake implements it because it is mandated by the GNU Standards, but it doesn't work reliably across packages. Maintainers who write install hooks typically neglect to write uninstall hooks. Also, since it can't reliably uninstall a previously installed version of a package, it isn't useful for what most people would want to use it for anyway. We recommend using a real packaging system, several of which are freely available. In particular, GNU Stow, RPM, and the Debian packaging system seem like good choices.

This document was generated by Gary V. Vaughan on May, 24 2001 using texi2html