[plug] Uninstalling from *.bin install

[Campbell, David (Ex AS17)]

Ari,

> Ari Finander wrote:
> I've got the rpm commands pretty much worked out (and if I can't find
> info in the HOWTOs, Man pages, etc you can be sure I'll ask here hehe)
> but what if I installed a program from a binary?  I installed jdk1.3
> (Java 2) as root from a binary.  I now want to remove this, and
> reinstall it as a user.

You have just discovered why rpm's were built in the first place.
Historically binary packages where distributed as compressed
tar files (Slackware uses the extension .tgz from memory).
To uninstall, a script would run "tar tvzf <package>.tgz" to extract
a list of files installed (or this was generated as the files were
installed). So you should be able to use that command (tar) to
track down the files you need to remove.

The problem with using tar and listing files is this does not account for
package dependencies. Another big disadvantage is that the speed
of processing the list files (Slackware could install a file from several
packages, hence there was some checks required to ensure that
the file was not required elsewhere), using gdb (or similar) speeds
things up.

Here endth the history lesson.

David Campbell

PS: The Slackware distribution still exists and would be the
recommended distribution for a machine without a CD-ROM
drive or a network card (the whole distribution is built arround
the 1.44MB floppy). Some people refer to such machines
as boat anchors.