[BioC] FW: uninstalling

[Jan T. Kim]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 at 03:05:03PM -0500, James W. MacDonald wrote:
> Law, Annie wrote:
> >I would also like to know how to uninstall Bioconductor properly.
> 
> Probably your best bet is to use the remove.packages2() function in 
> reposTools. If you simply want to uninstall R, on windows, there is 
> usually an uninstall option under Start/Programs/R. On *nix, just rm -rf 
> the whole directory containing R.

Generally, the standard way of uninstalling on Unix is to issue the
command

    make uninstall

in the same directory where ``make install'' was run to install the thing
(whether R or something else, this works as long as the makefile was
generated using the standard autoconf / automake stuff).

Normally, there is no "the whole directory", as different things are
installed into different directories (e.g. /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib
etc.). Tracking down all these files and removing them is rather
difficult for larger packages such as R, and things left over could
mean that the new installation is not entirely "pristine".

If the source directory is not available any longer, the next best thing
might be to get the tar.gz archive of the currently installed version,
unpack that, run the ``./configure'' command with the same flags that
were used for the installation, and run ``make uninstall'' from there.
The most important flag is ``--prefix'' in this case, of course.

Greetinx, Jan
-- 
 +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+
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