[racket] Uninstalling Racket

Three minutes ago, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> "--prefix /usr/local/racket-5.1" (for example) has been working
> great for my clients and me for years, and I hope that it continues
> to work in exactly the same way.

It will.


> Note that originally I started building from source because the
> distribution ".deb" or ".rpm" build didn't include the CGC binaries
> on which one of my clients depends.  Now that we've been building
> from source, the "--prefix" has been handy for letting us have
> multiple versions installed, and for having them follow a consistent
> naming convention (with less chance for user error in having the
> correct version number in the pathname, since we're never manually
> moving the tree around nor manually renaming it).

Since you're using a racket-specific path as a prefix, you're getting
a very similar end result -- but IMO less convenient in the prefix
case.

I'll try to clarify the visible differences.

The build part is nearly identical.  Here are the build steps that
you'd use in *both* cases, with sample directory names -- steps that
are different are marked with "PRFX" for a --prefix build and "INPL"
for an in-place one:

       cd /tmp
       tar xzf racket-5.1-src-unix.tgz
       cd racket-5.1/src
       mkdir build
       cd build
  PRFX ../configure --prefix /usr/local/racket-5.1
  INPL ../configure
       make
       make install
       cd /tmp
  PRFX rm -rf racket-5.1
  INPL rm -rf racket-5.1/src # <-- optional
  INPL mv racket-5.1 /usr/local

The differences at this point are:

* In the prefix case, you cannot move the resulting directory.  In the
  in-place case it can move -- and it can be accessed by different
  paths.  (For example, you mount /usr/local as /mnt/server/local on a
  second machine, and then run /mnt/server/local/racket-5.1/racket)

* In the prefix case, things are spread in an FHS-like way:
  - executables:   /usr/local/racket-5.1/bin/*
  - collections:   /usr/local/racket-5.1/lib/racket/collects/*
  - documentation: /usr/local/racket-5.1/share/racket/doc/*
  - libraries:     /usr/local/racket-5.1/lib/*
               and /usr/local/racket-5.1/lib/racket/*
  - includes:      /usr/local/racket-5.1/include/racket
  - man pages:     /usr/local/racket-5.1/share/man/man1/*
  and in the in-place case you get a simpler tree in your resulting
  directory:
  - executables:   /usr/local/racket-5.1/bin/*
  - collections:   /usr/local/racket-5.1/collects/*
  - documentation: /usr/local/racket-5.1/doc/*
  - libraries:     /usr/local/racket-5.1/lib/*
  - includes:      /usr/local/racket-5.1/include/*
  - man pages:     /usr/local/racket-5.1/man/*

* In the racket case, the directory layout corresponds to the source,
  so you can keep the .git directory, easily create patches, etc.

IMO, these are all advantages for the in-place side.  They're minor,
but since building involves the same efforst, I prefer the better
option.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!