Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] stale files after update

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I've just updated mxe, then executed
>
>   make build-requirements
>   make qt
>   make freetype
>   make clean-pkg
>
> However, this doesn't remove old stuff from mxe's `usr' subdirectory.
> For example, I see
>
>   git/mxe/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/share/aclocal-1.13/
>   git/mxe/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/share/aclocal-1.14/
>
>   git/mxe/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/share/cmake-2.8/
>   git/mxe/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/share/cmake-3.0/
>
>   git/mxe/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/lib/libgettextsrc-0.19.2.so
>   git/mxe/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/lib/libgettextsrc-0.19.3.so
>
> etc., etc., resulting in almost 500MByte more data on my hard disk.
>
> How can I get rid of the no longer needed files after such an update?

To answer my own question: It seems that there is *no* possibility to
do that at all.  The correct way would be to have the old package
doing a `make uninstall' before removing the package with `make
clean'.  Unfortunately, the `uninstall' target doesn't get much love
by program maintainers and thus fails frequently to do the right
thing.  It would also mean to unpack and configure the old package
again, which is inconvenient.

A possible solution would be to have mxe protocol what files are
actually installed during `make install', and `make clean' uses this
information to remove the right files – by computing the difference
between the old and the new protocol of `make install', for example.
I have no idea how reliable and stable such a solution would be (my
gut feeling is that it is not stable enough).

On the other hand, there are excellent solutions already available –
what about using `rpm' to manage those things?


    Werner