From: Philip Machanick <philip@concave.cs.wits.ac.za> Subject: Re: A discipline for packages Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 13:12:32 GMT
In article <FOX.93Jan2225646@graphics.nyu.edu> David Fox, fox@cs.nyu.edu
writes:
>system. The nice thing about symbolic links is that they
>can tell you where they are pointing, whereas all you know about
>a hard link is how many other names it has. To de-install the
>foo package you just remove every symbolic link anywhere that
>points to /packages/foo/* and then rm -rf /packages/foo/*. If
>you have a dangling link into /packages/foo/* you just get the
>foo distribution and extract the missing file. If it is not there,
How about the opposite: install the file in the target directory,
and keep a sym link to it in /packages/xxx ? That way, if you
de-install, you can remove the file from the place where it would
usually be found, and keep the sym link as documentation of what to
get back if you need to reinstall it. De-installing then involves
following all sym links to rm the actual files.