Mac uninstall-hs should have a --remove-all-but-latest option

[paulbloch]

When scripting to update Haskell on a number of computers, it would be nice to have an option to uninstall-hs that would remove all the previous versions so I could run that and the end of my update script.

[gbaz]

I think we could just have an "upto" as well as a "thru" argument?

I'd take that pull request in an instant if you wanted to do it. Otherwise a bit fried from the release at the moment and can't promise tackling any time soon.

[paulbloch]

An "upto" argument would work just fine.

I'm probably not a good enough programmer to tackle it myself, but I could look at the source next week.

On 27 May 2016, at 12:46 PM, gbaz notifications@github.com wrote:

I think we could just have an "upto" as well as a "thru" argument?

I'd take that pull request in an instant if you wanted to do it. Otherwise a bit fried from the release at the moment and can't promise tackling any time soon.

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[gbaz]

I bet you just go to https://github.com/haskell/haskell-platform/blob/master/hptool/os-extras/osx/bin/uninstall-hs.hs#L559 then copy/paste those blocks, swaping thru to upto and VersionThru to VersionUpto then fix the usage message at https://github.com/haskell/haskell-platform/blob/master/hptool/os-extras/osx/bin/uninstall-hs.hs#L332 and you're basically done

[paulbloch]

I'm not whether this is a strictly an uninstall-hs requirement. The haskell.pkg that install haskell on OS X writes installation receipts. These are not removed when a version of haskell is removed with unistall-hs. Here are the receipts on one system after running uninstall-hs all --remove.

root@iota: ~ 21# pkgutil --pkgs|grep -i org.haskell.HaskellPlatform.

org.haskell.HaskellPlatform.GHC7103.pkg

org.haskell.HaskellPlatform.GHC801.pkg

org.haskell.HaskellPlatform.Libraries.710.pkg

org.haskell.HaskellPlatform.Libraries.80-minimal.pkg

[gbaz]

To be honest I have no idea about expected behavior or best practices regarding those receipts. Some googling around doesn't seem to reveal any "right thing" to do...

Do you suggest that uninstall-hs should use pkgutil to forget the receipts of things it uninstalls?

That sounds reasonable -- but it would be nice to have some apple documentation or otherwise on what developers are expected to do so I feel its not just making it up as we go along :-)

[paulbloch]

I now have a work-around for scripting removal of old versions that is fine for now. In my mananagement framework (Munki), I now just have a preinstall script that does an uninstall-hs all --remove and a pkgutil --forget`.

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/uninstall-hs all --remove
pkgutil --regexp --forget .Haskell.
exit

I think that works when removing all. If the software has been removed, there shouldn't be any receipts that say it is installed. Doing this for the --upto option of uninstall-hs is a little more complicated because we need to know exactly which receipts to remove that correspond to the software versions removed.

There may be a different approach to this entire problem. Is there a reason Haskell installers keep the old versions? Do old binaries need the older Frameworks? If that is true, then just get rid of the popup that tells users that there are old versions that should be uninstalled.

If there is no reason to keep old versions than maybe the new version could just install over the current version. Then the receipts could just increment the version number. Instead of having a different receipt for each version, just have a Haskell receipt with the correct version in the receipt contents. Currently all Haskell receipts have "version: 1" in their contents.

root@baka: ~ 12# pkgutil --pkg-info org.haskell.HaskellPlatform.GHC801.pkg
package-id: org.haskell.HaskellPlatform.GHC801.pkg
version: 1
volume: /
location: Library/Frameworks
install-time: 1464813852

In some mythical future it could be:

root@baka: ~ 12# pkgutil --pkg-info org.haskell.HaskellPlatform.pkg
package-id: org.haskell.HaskellPlatform.pkg
version: 8.0.1
volume: /
location: Library/Frameworks
install-time: 1464813852

[gbaz]

Keeping the old versions around can be important for people. There's an activate-hs script that was only ever experimental (the released version still has one dumb bug) that swaps around the aliases to point to different platforms. So you can install a bunch of platforms and swap between them, to test your package out in different ghc versions or the like.

We definitely don't want to "write over".

Adding the upTo thing and also teaching uninstall-hs itself to call pkgutil -- forget seems very reasonable though.