I always just used `--prefix="$HOME"` so that everything went into `~/bin`, `~/lib`, `~/man`, etc...
I did look into stow a couple of times, and would have been fine with it dropping symlinks going into those dirs if I'd have used it.
(A few years after XDG started being commonly used I moved everything in my `~/etc` into `~/.config`, and `~/etc` is now a symlink to it. I occasionally wonder if doing it the other way around and setting up XDG_CONFIG_DIR would be more old-skool, before catching my reflection in my monitor and realising how daft that thought is.)
(If a project's build system does not provide an "uninstall" target (coughcmakecough) then the project likely has other deficiencies and should be avoided.)
I mean, you could probably get away with just keeping the `Makefile` around. But for the stuff I installed from source, I was often interested in keeping the source code around anyway, for curiosity's sake. And hard drives are big, while source code trees generally aren't - comparatively speaking.
Fair enough. In that job I was working on a remote Linux system that was quite outdated. So everything I wanted to install (newer version of Emacs, etc) required me to build so many libraries, as the system ones were too old (Emacs alone required 50-100). I didn't want the hassle of keeping all the source code around.
> I always just used `--prefix="$HOME"` so that everything went into `~/bin`, `~/lib`, `~/man`, etc...
You can't just use rm as a blunt instrument. ~/bin will contain lots of binaries from lots of packages. You want to uninstall only one package. How do you know which files correspond to that package?
I always just used `--prefix="$HOME"` so that everything went into `~/bin`, `~/lib`, `~/man`, etc...
I did look into stow a couple of times, and would have been fine with it dropping symlinks going into those dirs if I'd have used it.
(A few years after XDG started being commonly used I moved everything in my `~/etc` into `~/.config`, and `~/etc` is now a symlink to it. I occasionally wonder if doing it the other way around and setting up XDG_CONFIG_DIR would be more old-skool, before catching my reflection in my monitor and realising how daft that thought is.)