Fix aggressive "rm -rf" in uninstall target

[nega0]

lcov's make uninstall wiped my ~/.local/share. This was... surprising.

The offending line is

lcov/Makefile

Line 190 in b1a5332

rm -rf `dirname $(SHARE_INST_DIR)`

SHARE_DIR_INST comes from:

SHARE_DIR := $(PREFIX)/share/lcov/
SHARE_INST_DIR := $(DESTDIR)$(SHARE_DIR)

So, make uninstall PREFIX=${HOME}/.local would give us:

rm -rf `dirname /home/nega/.local/share/lcov`

and, since dirname gives us the "last non-slash component and trailing slashes removed" we're just doing

rm -rf /home/nega/.local/share`

On the Good/Bad Scale, this ranks as a "Bad". I'm glad I didn't use the default PREFIX of /usr/local. Losing /usr/local/share would have been more than an "inconvenience".

This PR removes this gross hammer, by removing the examples and tests from the make install target. It also cleans up the manpages that make uninstall ignores.

Ideally, the uninstall target would be removed outright until a less fragile version is developed.

Signed-off-by: nega [email protected]

---

• prefer to be explicit when constructing paths
• fix aggressive "rm -rf" with a less aggressive "rm -rf"
• remove examples and tests from the install target

[nega0]

sigh. i guess the work flows will have to be reworked.

[nega0]

i see... i think it's incorrect that lcov is trying to remove directories that it didn't install. obviously discussion is warrented.

[hartwork]

Hi @nega0, I'm sorry to hear about your experience with LCOV's make uninstall.

On a detail level, I'd like to note that || true is likely not the most natural way to continue on error, there is prefix - for that. Let me demo that in a Bash terminal:

# make -f <(echo $'all:\n\t-false\n\techo hello' | tee /dev/stderr) ; echo $?
all:
        -false
        echo hello
false
make: [/dev/fd/63:2: all] Error 1 (ignored)
echo hello
hello
0

Maybe deleting the whole target would indeed be an option that should be considered or having its use-cost-ratio be evaluated.

[nega0]

I just followed conventions already established in the file and introduced 16 months a go in 98f1779. You'll notice another convention I followed was the use of $(RM) -f .... By default GNU make sets RM to rm -f, making the added -f superfluous. It would be "more correct" to just use $(RM). The goal of this PR is to correct a dangerous operation, not to correct stylistic conventions.

[henry2cox]

Subsumed by #393.
Closing