Re: Is this a "Stupid Question" ?

...and on Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 07:50:53PM -0700, Adam Smith used the keyboard:
> I have posted this and similar questions repeatedly and can't even raise
> a single response. I am being led to believe that this then 'Must be a
> stupid question' although people say that there is no stupid question.
> Is that another for political correctness
>
> I am attempting an install of 7.4.3 on FreeBSD O/S 4.9, apparently
> remnants of 7.3.x are scattered around on the disk from (a) previous
> ports installation, causing mutex_lock/unlock, libpq.so and other
> installation problems. I want to reconfigure and reinstall. How do I
> know what, & where all these fragments are located or how do I uninstall
> all of them or at least those that should be removed.
>

Hi Adam,

I don't think it's a stupid question, but it may be, given the way
ports are being maintained, difficult to answer. Figuring out where
and what was being installed in 7.3.x would've been rather easy if
you had installed the official source distribution of PostgreSQL -
all it would've taken was a download from the archives and a reinstall
from some wrapper script that took notice of where and what was being
installed. It may have even been just as simple as running "configure"
with original settings, followed by "make uninstall".

Since you're using FBSD ports collection though, a lot of the
responsibility for what goes where and how the various other aspects
of the source distribution are being organized, has been delegated
implicitly by you to the FBSD ports maintainer of the PostgreSQL
package.

I suggest you investigate where the ports graveyard of the postgres
package is located in order to find out what happened to the version
of PostgreSQL your system still seems to be holding parts of, and
try downloading and reinstalling (or maybe even "uninstall"ing) it;
if nothing else, at least it should enable you to look into how it
was being organized across the disks by providing you with all the
Makefiles that were used to install it.

Bottom line is - any (or all) of the above may be next to impossible
to do if the person that installed 7.3.x on that machine used some
non-standard setup options and failed to document it somewhere. In
that case, all that's left for you to do is to try to get a complete
listing of the files that are being installed in 7.3.x (perhaps by
installing with a DESTDIR, or using a different --prefix) and make
heavy use of find(1), locate(1) and other UNIX system commands for
locating files on a system, in an effort to chase down and remove all
the fragments of that previous build. At least writing scripts to
automate this for you isn't all that difficult to do.

Hope this helped,
--
Grega Bremec
Senior Administrator
Noviforum Ltd., Software & Media
http://www.noviforum.si/