Re: make uninstall could do rmdir

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Stepan,

* Stepan Kasal wrote on Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 04:40:01PM CET:
>   recently, I run "make uninstall" with a package I previously installed
> by "make install".
> 
> The package heavily uses the feature
>       foodir = ...
>       foo_HEADERS = ...
> and thus created many directories.  After the uninstall, the directories
> are empty.  I imagined that "make uninstall" could remove them in such case.
> 
> Why this is not working?

Feature: the directories it would remove are not part of the package.
This is arguable, but it would be very surprising if `make uninstall'
removed /usr/local/bin which was previously set up with special
permissions and owner.

For nonstandard directories, this might be even more arguable.
But then again, removing empty directories from a tree is trivial,
and, as the comment you quoted says:

>       Note that `uninstall' is not meant as a replacement for a real
>       packaging tool.


Regards,
Ralf