Obviously, I'm biased on this issue ;-). However, these approaches are equivalent in that they both track the set of installed files: an "uninstall" script just wraps a function around this set. Meta-info is more general: you can use it to uninstall, you can also use it to find out which package a particular file belongs to, or to verify a file's checksum if you believe that it may have been corrupted. The two approaches are not incompatible: why not provide both? Greg Ward wrote:
Hmmm, good idea. I've idly mused about how to uninstall module distributions, and this option hadn't occurred to me. So now I can see *two* good ways to do uninstallation:
* keep track of the files installed (eg. using Michael Muller's "pkginfo" patch), and have a universal uninstall script that digs up the list of files for a particular distribution
* generate a custom uninstall script for each installed module distribution
============================================================================= michaelMuller = mmuller@enduden.com | http://www.cloud9.net/~proteus ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -- Henry Spencer =============================================================================