On Wed, Oct 20, 1999 at 11:54:16PM +0200, David Jardine wrote:
> It appears that mozilla creates a subdirectory in the user's home
> directory with the user's name, eg /home/fred/fred. I ran
> <dpkg --purge mozilla> which according to my understanding of the
> manpages should eliminate all traces of its existence - it didn't
> say that exactly, but this seemed the most radical option.
>
> However, the directories are still there, so:
> Should I have done it another way?
> Has mozilla left any other droppings on my system?
> If there is no other way to clean up, shouldn't there be?
dpkg has no way of knowing about files the program creates after
installation, so it can't remove them. That means that any config files
which are created and stuck in your $HOME are going to stay there even
when you remove the package that created them...
If you take a look in /var/lib/dpkg/info/, the *.list files tell dpkg
what files belong to what package, and therefore, what files dpkg can
remove when removing the associated package.
Aside from the actual difficulties of knowing about files created by a
package after installation, I can think of plenty of reasons why having
dpkg remove such files would be really evil.i It *could* be done, though
- if the package maintainer, for example, made the {pre,post}rm scripts
look for known files and kill them (e.g. the script for mozilla could
search the /home of every user for it's .mozilla dir or something).
--
[ Matthew Gregan ] [ GPG ID: B63A1E95 ] [ kinetik@ihug.co.nz ]
[ GPG fingerprint: FB83 2911 F170 B31C 9E4A E382 CA8A A2F6 B63A 1E95 ]
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