Enthought has a package called Enstaller which includes a modified version of setuptools + an enstaller package that adds some different functionality. One of the modifications to setuptools adds an uninstall command which works well with our .egg's. Dealing with eggs allows us to do some dependency checking to warn the user if the package they are trying to remove is required by another package. Another feature we added is similar to the uninstall registry you mentioned. Whenever someone invokes easy_install and a change is made(i.e. a package(s) was removed, added, or modified), we create an entry in a rollback cache file that stores the package-version of everything installed in site-packages at that time. There is a rollback menu that displays the changes between the different known rollback points and you can restore your state to a previous working state in this way. A lot of this stuff is specific to setuptools/eggs but the fundamentals of it could be helpful when determining how to implement these kinds of things into distutils itself, if that is the desired path. Here is the trunk for Enstaller: https://svn.enthought.com/svn/enthought/Enstaller/trunk/ -- Chris Galvan Tarek Ziadé wrote:
Hello
Many people are asking for an uninstall command. While there are possible side-effects when removing all installed files, I think it worths it...
I would like to introduce an uninstall command in distutils, using Marc-André Lemburg's mxSetup tool (see http://www.egenix.com/products/python/mxBase/) and turning it into a uninstall command.
It's quite straighforward since it uses the install command in dry-run mode to get the files to remove. It requires of course to keep the source.
Next, (in a second step) I was wondering if a uninstall registery could not be a good thing to have, to store a record of the installed files so there's no need to keep the source for uninstallation. This would required a new command, (and a detailed specification of course)
There's an open ticket here about that (#4673)
Any thoughts ?
Regards Tarek