[H-GEN] What have I installed?

[Greg Black]

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Bradley Marshall wrote:

| On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Ewan Edwards wrote:
| > Yesterday, I downloaded the tarball for a recent version of a fairly commonly
| > used piece of software (dhcp-3.0.1rc11.tar.gz) to a RH7.3 box.  After having
| > a look at the README file and running the obligatory "./configure", "make",
| > and "make install" commands (without error I might add), I now want to know
| > what files I have actually 'installed' on this box.  Can someone please tell
| > me where I should look for some kind of list of what files (including man
| > pages) have been generated and installed?
| 
| One thing I always do before installing software like this is
| to run a make -n install, this will show you what commands it
| would run, without actually running them.  Give it a go, and
| it should show you what was installed.

Unfortunately, although this sounds useful, it is very often
useless because authors (or distributors) dream up complex
makefiles for various reasons.  This is a common scenario:

    $ make -n install
    cd .../foo && make FOO=bar build
    cd .../foo && make FOO=bar real-install

Then, if we try:

    $ make -n real-install

We could end up with a ton of stuff that really tells us nothing
useful.  I just tried this with a trivial program (which only
installs 3 files[1]) and got 53 screen lines of output, none of
which revealed the three files to be installed.  At this point,
sane people give up on this path.

True, not all software is packaged this way, but there are
literally thousands of applications that are.  So, despite the
fact that I personally wish that "make -n install" would be the
answer, it is often not.

Greg

[1] The installed files went in /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/man
    and /usr/local/share/doc so it wasn't a complex install.

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