but then it needs to come with a curl|bash uninstall tool. Most of these install scripts are just half the story, and the uninstalling part doesn't exist.

▲

ryandrake 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sadly, a great many 3rd party developers don't give a single shit about uninstallation, and won't lift a finger to do it cleanly, correctly and completely. If their installer/packager happens to do it, great, but they're not going to spend development cycles making it wonderful.

▲

thewebguyd 2 days ago | parent [-]

This is why its so upsetting over in Linux land how so many people are just itching to move away from distro package managers and package maintainers. Curl | bash is everywhere now because "packaging is hard" and devs can't be arsed to actually package their software for the OS they developed it for.

Like, yeah I get it - it's frustrating when xyz software you want isn't in the repos, but (assuming it's open source) you're also welcome to package it up for your distro yourself. We already learned lessons from Windows where installers and "uninstallers" don't respect you or your filesystem. Package managers solved this problem many, many years ago.

	▲	maccard 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		What package manager would you recommend that allows a one line install on windows (wsl), Mac, debian, fedora and arch?

▲

jrpear 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

For those install scripts which allow changing the install prefix (e.g. autoconf projects---though involving a built step too), I've found GNU Stow to be a good solution to the uninstall situation. Install in `/usr/local/stow` or `~/.local/stow` then have Stow set up symlinks to the final locations. Then uninstall with `stow --delete`.