[Distutils] Uninstall

[Martin Aspeli]

Martin Aspeli wrote:
> Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>> At 12:15 AM 8/27/2007 +0100, Martin Aspeli wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Someone asked me today, how to uninstall a package that was installed
>>> with easy_install. The best I could come up with was, remove the .egg
>>> file/directory from site-packages and remove the corresponding line from
>>> easy_install.pth. That's pretty lame and error prone.
>>>
>>> Is there a better way?
>> Somewhat better:
>>
>> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#uninstalling-packages
> 
> So ... that removes it from easy_install.pth, but doesn't remove the 
> downloaded .egg file/directory?

... mmm, I guess so, in a roundabout kind of way.

I think it'd be a huge improvement if easy_install had a '--remove' 
option or something like that. Even if it just did this exact operation 
under the hood, it'd be a lot more intuitive.

It'd be better if there was a way to remove the scripts and other egg 
files as well. I don't think people can be expected to realise where 
eggs are getting installed (i.e. site-packages/foo.egg, and maybe 
scripts/foobar and whatever else) and find and remove these files.

Would easy_install in theory have enough context to work out what files 
was installed for an egg in the first place?

Martin

-- 
Acquisition is a jealous mistress