Arch Linux

Mr. Alex

Member

Registered: 2010-08-26

Posts: 623

Installing official programs on Arch

Hi!
When I install some program from official repos on Arch, it makes some changes in the system, right? And when I perform

# pacman -Rsn app

does it roll back every change it made when was installing? Or some changes in system won't roll back any more?

Please answer in detail.

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,731

Website

Re: Installing official programs on Arch

Yes

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AUR packages • Zsh and other configs

Runiq

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2008-10-29

Posts: 1,053

Re: Installing official programs on Arch

Yes

/thread.

In all seriousness, though: Pacman *never* touches your home directory, for example. Configuration files in there are usually created by the programs themselves and thus won't be deleted by pacman. There's some other stuff as well (like untidy post_install hooks in .install files) that might be a problem. However, in general, I'd say pacman does a pretty thorough job.

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Dotfiles

Mr. Alex

Member

Registered: 2010-08-26

Posts: 623

Re: Installing official programs on Arch

Well, home dir is not the only dir that can be changed while installing programs. What about
/etc
/lib
/sys
/usr
?

Allan

Pacman

From: Brisbane, AU

Registered: 2007-06-09

Posts: 11,672

Website

Re: Installing official programs on Arch

Yes

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PGP Key: F99FFE0FEAE999BD | I develop pacman - buy me a drink!

flamelab

Member

From: Athens, Hellas (Greece)

Registered: 2007-12-26

Posts: 2,160

Re: Installing official programs on Arch

1 2 and 4. /sys is (I'm not really sure) populated by the kernel.

Mr. Alex

Member

Registered: 2010-08-26

Posts: 623

Re: Installing official programs on Arch

Yes

Thanks. Tons of information!

Allan

Pacman

From: Brisbane, AU

Registered: 2007-06-09

Posts: 11,672

Website

Re: Installing official programs on Arch

No problem.  Glad I could be of help.

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PGP Key: F99FFE0FEAE999BD | I develop pacman - buy me a drink!

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Installing official programs on Arch

Pacman is just a package manager - often the package itself does some changes and doesn't properly clean up: leftover .pyc files come to mind.
As Runiq said, pacman doesn't touch your ~, but the installed packages of course may - it's your job to understand what that app does and how does it operate and generally keep an eye on it.

dyscoria

Member

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 1,007

Re: Installing official programs on Arch

vlc does some funny stuff generating plugin cache. IIRC it alters files in /usr/lib/vlc just after installation, and thus the files are not covered by pacman. The package maintainer accounts for this with a rm -rf /usr/lib/vlc after uninstallation.

Generally software doesn't do stupid things like this, and package maintainers are very good, so you don't have to worry about this sort of stuff. But I mention this as an example for files that are unaccounted for by pacman.

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flack 2.0.6: menu-driven BASH script to easily tag FLAC files (AUR)
knock-once 1.2: BASH script to easily create/send one-time sequences for knockd (forum/AUR)