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ericb2
11,429 Pointswhy can't apt uninstall a manually installed package?
Jim Hoskins last words (in the video, not ever) are, "I recommend any time you need to install something, checking to make sure it's available in your package manager. It's much easier to install as well as manage. And when you need to, it's also easier to uninstall than if you had installed from source."
I presume (i.e. maybe not true) that apt is installing a package in the same location as the default when you manually install it. So why can't apt uninstall it? Does it work exclusively off of a log file of it's past installations? and if so, then will you screw things up if you manually delete something previously installed through apt?
4 Answers
Charles Smith
7,575 PointsI believe it depends on the package manager and how you install it. Package managers have different features. If you're using apt, for example and install a .deb on Ubuntu, I believe it's smart enough to know how to uninstall.
If you're not using a .deb, however, it has no way of knowing what you've installed where. But if you download the source and compile yourself or use another tool for installation, apt will have no idea where files are kept.
If you accidentally delete something from an installed package, I believ most package managers will have a reinstall option of some sort, but you probably want to check out the docs for your package manager of choice.
Mayur Pande
Courses Plus Student 11,711 Pointsso how would you go about uninstalling a manually added package? For example I want to try and uninstall the sqlite that we installed manually
Gianluca Maio
9,128 PointsMayur Pande: have you resolved the issue on how to properly uninstal a manually added package? I would like to uninstall sqlite from my Ubuntu
Mayur Pande
Courses Plus Student 11,711 PointsGianluca Maio Hi to be honest I can't remember too well what I did! But what I think I did was used command;
sudo apt-get remove sqlite
and then used the purge command to get rid of all its other data;
sudo apt-get purge sqlite
This has been a method I have been using for while to remove programs. So I am 90% sure this is what I did.
Hope this helps
Gianluca Maio
9,128 PointsMayur Pande Thank you for the tip. When I tried:
sudo apt-get remove sqlite3
it didn't work because sqlite3 was not installed with the apt-get, but it was installed with the source code. After little investigation, I used this command:
sudo make uninstall
and sqlite3 was gone from my system. There were, however, some warnings as the uninstall command is created by the creator of the source code. This means that it might not work for your system. I simply trusted sqlite developers and went ahead with the uninstall command. However, I'd be careful with other packages who are not as popular as, for example, sqllite
ericb2
11,429 Pointsericb2
11,429 PointsCharles Smith , thank you. That makes sense.