Re: Method to clean up MXE directory?

[John W. Eaton]

On 06/27/2016 01:02 PM, Rik wrote:

> Does anyone know how to clear the files associated with a specific target?
> Or do you just have to go in to the directories underneath the MXE build
> directory and start removing files?

Depending on the target (not all are handled in exactly the same way, 
apparently) you can get the list of files to remove from the file 
PKG.files or PKG.pkg in the installed-packages directory.  But that's 
far from perfect because not all packages generate these lists.

Here's what I'd like for mxe-octave to do for each package instead:

  * install into a temporary directory (some already do this, using 
DESTDIR=...; we need to make all targets do this consistently)

  * create a tar file from the files in that directory and save it 
(this step is new)

  * install the package into the usr/$(TARGET) directory from the tar 
file  (this step would replace the current install step)

  * insert the tar file into the dependency chain so that it is 
possible to remove the usr/$(TARGET) directory and simply reinstall from 
the tar files instead of rebuilding everything

By using an intermediate tar file like this, we could clean out the 
usr/$(TARGET) directory and rebuild with a newer version of a single 
package and be sure that there are no files left over from a previous 
build of that package that are no longer relevant.  And it would be 
relatively quick because you'd only need to untar the built packages 
that are already up to date.

It should also be possible to add a target that uninstalls a given 
package.  We could probably do that now just using file lists, but then 
you have to rebuild it to reinstall.  Or the uninstall step could save 
the files it removes, but that seems a bit convoluted -- we might as 
well just create an archive of the installed files as part of the 
installation process.

Stated above this job seems like it shouldn't be too difficult but the 
mxe-octave makefile is fairly complex.  Things are further complicated 
because not all packages use DESTDIR consistently, or they install or 
move files separately from doing a "make install" step for a package, 
and the rules seem slightly different for native vs. cross builds.

jwe