Question about dpkg -r

[Hope Duryea <hope_duryea@yahoo.com>]

Hi all,

I haven't read through the entire source, but from
what I can tell by using dpkg -r on a package, and
from looking at isdirectoryinuse(), and the call to it
in remove.c, it seems the criteria for whether a
directory is included in the removal of the package is
whether any other package has installed into it. Is
that correct?

If it is, I would like to suggest that it only do that
for directories it created as part of the install. In
other words, if it didn't need to create / or /usr,
but did have to create /usr/share, then, when the
package is removed, if /usr/share is now empty, it can
remove /usr/share, but since it didn't have to create
/usr or /, it should not (try to) remove those.

If that doesn't seem likely to happen, then is there
any way I can provide dpkg with the list of files to
remove and limit its action to just that list? I
didn't see anything in the code to suggest it reads in
a file (but again, I haven't read through all of it),
nor have I seen anything in any of the documentation
I've read through that would suggest I could, but I
figured it doesn't hurt to ask :)

Thanks,
Hope


       
____________________________________________________________________________________
Finding fabulous fares is fun.  
Let Yahoo! FareChase search your favorite travel sites to find flight and hotel bargains.
http://farechase.yahoo.com/promo-generic-14795097