why no python setup.py uninstall?

Alia Khouri alia_khouri at yahoo.com
Fri Dec 3 20:09:13 EST 2004


If the cannonical way to install a python app is

   python setup.py install

one would expect the following to uninstall it

   python setup.py uninstall

However, distutils doesn't automatically take care of that for you. 

Is this by design? Or is this something that could/should be addressed
in a future version of distutils?

The reason this came up for me is that I have a scheduled script that
downloads the cvs/svn versions of certain python apps (w/extensions),
and then builds and installs them to site-packages automatically by
'python setup.py install'. Just to be extra clean about it, I would
prefer to uninstall first, and then install.


AK


PS: I also have to manually uninstall apps from Mac OS X panther:
searching for .plists etc. I wonder if that was deliberate or
otherwise too... hmm...



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