distutils uninstall

[Skip Montanaro]

    Rick> I've been trying to figure out whether there are any plans to add
    Rick> an "uninstall" feature to the Python distutils. Googling has found
    Rick> several people posting the same question, but, to the best of my
    Rick> knowledge, no answers.

This has been proposed before.  It's not a trivial problem though.
Distutils would need to record all the files and directories it creates
during installation and carefully remove stuff during the uninstall process
(do things "backwards", not remove directories which still contain files,
etc).  That wouldn't be foolproof though, because unlike packaging systems
such as Red Hat's RPM, you don't have a full system picture.  What if your
distutils-installed package provides a new version of /etc/magic?  If you
uninstall it, /etc/magic would be deleted, since distutils couldn't tell
that /etc/magic was actually used by many other parts of the system.

Skip