No make uninstall

[etresoft]

Expected behavior and actual behavior.

The makefile does not have an uninstall target. I am doing some unusual platform builds and I see that something has been installed into the wrong location. But I can’t uninstall it. I have to wipe out my entire stack and rebuild.

Steps to reproduce the problem.

Run “make uninstall"

Operating system

macOS 10.14, but this is a custom stack much plain, old-school Unix.

GDAL version and provenance

2.4.1 from GitHub and checked out to the v2.4.1 tag

[mloskot]

https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2005-July/005991.html

If you need to be able to remove it, you could install it into
a GDAL specific tree with a configuration something like:

 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/gdal

or ./configure --prefix=/opt/gdal

The uninstall target has been considered, https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/ticket/133, but it's not easy to implement. It may never happen as the --prefix quite does the job.

[etresoft]

Yes. I know. I’m already doing that because I have a custom stack. But almost everything else can be installed and removed. Now I realize that GDAL is like Python and needs it own mini-stack. But Python is a build tool, not a distributable so I need to rework my build scripts to move GDAL off to its own directory.

I don’t consider --prefix a true solution. The only people who would use --prefix are people doing funky stuff like me. For most users, there is no uninstallation method and this forces even more dependence on various package managers.

If it isn’t worth the trouble, that’s fair enough. I’ll make changes to my build scripts.

[mloskot]

But I can’t uninstall it. I have to wipe out my entire stack and rebuild.

If you run ./configure --prefix=/opt/gdal and make && make install, and you rm -rf /opt/gdal, then you do not have to rebuild GDAL to re-install. You run make and it should deploy pretty much what you built previously.

[mloskot]

I don’t consider --prefix a true solution.

My take on that is GDAL does not offer canonical GNU Autotools build configuration. There is configure but rest is pretty much custom makefiles and scripts.

[jgrocha]

It would be nice to have an uninstall option.

I had gdal installed from sources on the default /usr/local folder. To remove it, I had to do a hack (on a single user environment):

sudo make install
find /usr/local/ -mmin -30 -type f -exec ls {} + | sudo xargs rm

I reinstalled it and them remove all modified files. Works. But it is a hack.

[mloskot]

Hacks are not uncommon, e.g. CMake offers no uninstall either and one has to employ a hack

https://github.com/mloskot/wsl-config/blob/334f317b9cac860cdf607d82eede243e4602f1bc/scripts/install-cmake-latest.sh#L29-L38

[strk]

I'm also missing an uninstall rule, especially for the python bindings.
Right now having a problem with them and trying to clean things up

[rouault]

The GDAL CMake build system in master has a "uninstall" target