[Haskell-cafe] uninstalling ghc-8.0.1-x86_64 installed through "install-haskell-platform.sh"

[Gary Fixler]

I grabbed the "Minimal (64 bit)" tar (YMMV if you got the Full or
32-bit versions) and had a look inside. It contains just the .sh file
and a .gz archive. The contents of the script are small; beyond a few
tests, it basically just does a `tar -C /` on the .gz file, which just
unpacks all the files in there to their original directories under
root, and then calls a setup script that unpacks with/into that big
list of files.

Listing the contents of the .gz, every single file path (of 7,377)
begins with "usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/", so everything
unpacked should be contained in there. The follow-up script that gets
called is in there under .../bin/activate-hs. Things get a bit more
complex in that script. It can be called with a few options, but isn't
called with any from the initial install script, so the following few
things then happen (after some simple, script-internal, setup stuff):

1) these symlink calls fire off, linking bin, man, and doc files from
the /usr/local/haskell/ghc*/ dir created above to the same locations
in the default directory (/usr/local/, as set at the top of the
script), and note that the script cleanly exits if it doesn't find bin
and share in the default dir (i.e. if you don't have /usr/local/bin
and /usr/local/share for some reason):

    symLinkInto "$prefix/bin" "$ghcRoot"/bin/*
    symLinkInto "$prefix/share/man/man1" "$ghcRoot"/share/man/man1/*
    symLinkInto "$prefix/share/doc" "$ghcRoot"/share/doc/ghc

The files in the bin dir that should have been copied from the
aforementioned `tar -C /`, which would alll get linked over are:

usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/hp2ps
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/ghc-8.0.1
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/runghc
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/happy
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/activate-hs
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/HsColour
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/ghc-pkg-8.0.1
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/hpc
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/runhaskell
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/runghc-8.0.1
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/hsc2hs
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/ghci
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/alex
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/cabal
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/stack
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/haddock
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/ghci-8.0.1
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/ghc-pkg
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/haddock-ghc-8.0.1
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/bin/ghc

Likewise, the man1 files linked over are just this one:

usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/share/man/man1/ghc.1

And finally, the [large number of] doc files... well, I'm not sure how
this works, as it's symlinking from"$ghcRoot"/share/doc/ghc/ in the
call above, but the files are all contained in
"$ghcRoot"/share/doc/ghc-8.0.1/ in the .gz file. I'm wondering if this
is a bug in the installation (and why I never seemed to have any local
docs for ghc):

usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/share/doc/ghc-8.0.1/html/
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/share/doc/ghc-8.0.1/html/users_guide/
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/share/doc/ghc-8.0.1/html/users_guide/phases.html
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/share/doc/ghc-8.0.1/html/users_guide/_images/
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/share/doc/ghc-8.0.1/html/users_guide/_images/prof_scc.svg
usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/share/doc/ghc-8.0.1/html/users_guide/ghc.html
...snipped here, as there are 3,633 in all, but all under .../ghc-8.0.1/...

2) packages then get registered via:

for conf in "$ghcRoot"/etc/registrations/*
do
    run "$ghcRoot"/bin/ghc-pkg register --verbose=0 --force $conf 2>/dev/null
done

The only thing I see in the .gz for registrations is:

usr/local/haskell/ghc-8.0.1-x86_64/etc/registrations/hscolour-1.24

I don't know what unregistering packages entails, sorry.

3) finally, some reporting on what it did


I think that's it. If you installed the full version, you may have
much more than this, but maybe this will serve as a guide to figuring
that out. It's not as messy as I guessed, but I don't know that
there's any command or one-liner that cleanly removes it all.

-g



On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 8:03 AM, Patrice <plevexier at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> How can I uninstall cleanly ghc-8.0.1-x86_64 that I installed using the
> script install-haskell-platform.sh (found on haskell.org website under
> Generic Linux). I'm on ubuntu Trusty.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Pat
>
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