Card on fire

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 10:55:06PM +0000, Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 15 July 2016 at 22:48:14 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> > For a time at Symantec I pushed through making the compiler runnable
> > directly off of the CD without requiring an installation.
> 
> Fun fact: this was basically THE killer feature of the Digital Mars
> compiler for me way back when. I started on a school computer where I
> couldn't install anything, and later, when I got a home computer, I
> kept it on disc.
> 
> To this day, I still use dmd the same way: unzip it and call the
> program in-place instead of trying to install it.

Nowadays I almost never install software unless it comes prepackaged
with my OS's packaging system and can be installed/uninstalled with a
single command.  For things like dmd I just set my PATH to run it
directly from dmd/src where it was built.  For things that need to
install a whole bunch of stuff in an entire filesystem hierarchy, I
usually recompile it with PREFIX set to a subdirectory dedicated to
everything related to that program, and install it there (with
appropriate PATH settings).

The main reason is that almost all software these days install needless
junk all over the place, and there's no way to ensure that an uninstall
didn't leave detritus behind if I just let it install into the system
directories.  When it's inside a dedicated directory I just blast the
whole thing away when I want to uninstall.


T

-- 
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