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Installing and UnInstalling - Effect on overall system?
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Zelt
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 1:10 am    Post subject: Installing and UnInstalling - Effect on overall system? Reply with quote

When installing/uninstalling on windows it often leaves rubbish behind, sometimes leaving temp files, other times leaving loads of entries in your registry which can cause more problems.

Does linux or gentoo have its own similar traits?

If I install program G now and dont want it tomorrow, if I uninstall program G will my system be exactly back to how it was yesterday?
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Jaglover
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 2:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

There may be some conf file left behind in /etc but it will not affect the system performance in any way.
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eccerr0r
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 3:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think pretty much all OS can leave cruft behind because it can't always know what's associated and what's not associated with the removed software.

Leaving stuff in /etc is actually not necessarily benign - the next time a piece that piece of software is installed, it could use that old config file, and cause unexpected behavior. It could also have side effects.

As with the standard Unix mantra it's up to the admin to know what got left behind and what needs to be fixed when software is removed.
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i92guboj
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 6:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you truly want a time machine then you should look into volume snapshotting. There's nothing else that can give you that guarantee.

Any software can create files that can't be easily tracked in any way by the package manager. For that, the package manager would need to monitor all the I/O at filesystem level. And even then, there would be the problem of knowing what's user data and what's "cruft".

In which regards /etc, if you are truly paranoid you can always check the man pages for each program before uninstalling (or after doing it, on-line). All the man pages have a "files" section where you can find detailed info about the files related to that tool or program.

You could as well mount /usr read-only except when you are updating to prevent programs from writing to there on a regular basis. Good luck with that nowadays though. I have no idea the amount of trouble that you will or won't find if/when doing that.
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eccerr0r
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 03, 2014 12:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Snapshotting isn't quite perfect either as future installed programs may have side effect/dependencies upon the removed program. Ideally you don't write programs like that so this won't ever happen, but it does anyway. Not sure if a "directory" based config is the best way to solve this where programs that may need to modify another program's behavior is modified that way, otherwise something like dbus is needed for that program to modify the behavior of another program provided that it supports hooks for this. Then in this case, when the program is removed, it will only remove that program and will no longer call hooks into the other program, and everything is back where it was.

Sort of like a plugin... but with different, peer programs.

I hear Win10 wants to achieve this... Unfortunately if any legacy apps are involved that modifies the OS, this breaks.
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steveL
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 03, 2014 2:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you're that worried about it, some people have /etc as a git repo.

In general, you don't get bloat, because files are tracked and removed on uninstall or upgrade. It's only conf files, eg in the user's homedir, or in /etc, and ofc data files which are up to the user, that you need to worry about.

More "modern" approaches, like spamming half the fs with "lib" config to accommodate distros without etc-update/dispatch-conf, are perhaps something to add to the list, though in general portage should remove those fine, and they're not supposed to be user-edited.

Oh and nowadays, many programs use .local/share/apps/foo for example and .config under home, rather than a .appname directory or .apprc file.
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Roman_Gruber
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 03, 2014 8:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Usually config files in /etc user home directory with usually starting with a dot.

Distfiles contains the downloaded sources which you may consider as junk

As removing config files leads to problems I doubt any package manager removes them as it would lead to many bugs and many complaints.

when you are worried about distfiles tehre is something like eclean --destructive distfiles.
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