WARNING : Deinstall in SCO UNIX DANGEROUS!

[Sean Eric Fagan]

In article <9113 at lkbreth.foretune.co.jp> trebor at lkbreth.foretune.co.jp (Robert J Woodhead) writes:
>Going into CUSTOM, I noticed that there were
>several packages in the development system that I didn't need, like DOSDEV
>and OS2DEV, so I decided to deinstall them.

I have deinstalled DOSDEV and OS2DEV on kithrup (several times, in fact, for
reasons I won't get into here 8-)), and have never had any problems
whatsoever.  I don't know what your problem was, but it's the first that I
(even as an SCO employee) have heard of something like that happening.

>Upon trying to deinstall OS2DEV, CUSTOM reported an error.  

What error?  Did you, perhaps, run out of disk space?  (It tries to build a
file list, according to its messages, and if it can only make a file that
has "/usr" as the pathname...)

>Things were trashed enough that I had to reinitialize the HD and reinstall
>all the packages (sigh - an afternoon wasted).  

Ah.  I suspect from that that your disk actually *died*.  Not sco's fault.
(Yes, such things happen occasionaly to disks.  One of the reinstalls for
kithrup, a few months ago [and when I upgraded to unix] was because the disk
died.  It reformated without problem, though, and a scan reported no bad
tracks.)

>There were a few bobbles because
>SCO doesn't bother to mention the dependencies -- who would imagine that to
>run the C compiler you need the XENIX 386 cross development libraries?

You also have a *very* old version of the devsys.  You probably want to
upgrade...

>Did anyone at SCO ever bother to test their install/deinstall scripts?

Gee, no.  Actually, we never install or deinstall internally, and you are,
in fact, the first person to ever deinstall.  (That was sarcasm.)

-- 
Sean Eric Fagan  | "I made the universe, but please don't blame me for it;
sef at kithrup.COM  |  I had a bellyache at the time."
-----------------+           -- The Turtle (Stephen King, _It_)
Any opinions expressed are my own, and generally unpopular with others.