uninstalling macports could be easier

[dave@…]

Instead of getting the user to know about and to follow the directions ​here, MacPorts could do all of that itself when the user issues a port command, such as

port uninstall macports

or

port selfuninstall

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Uninstalling MacPorts could be easier. On the other hand, how easy do we really want it to be to uninstall everything, which is a drastic and irreversible step and also something that won't be done regularly?

And a couple problems come to mind with this proposal:

1. Sometimes, MacPorts doesn't work anymore. For example, if you had MacPorts installed on a PowerPC Mac, and then migrated that system to an Intel Mac running a newer version of OS X that does not include a PowerPC emulator. In that case, you cannot run port anything and need to uninstall manually.
2. MacPorts is not interactive, but you'd want to ask the user "Are you sure?"

We could offer a separate shell script to uninstall.

The proposed self-management feature may address this concern.

[neverpanic (Clemens Lang)]

We can ship the command from the guide in a shell script, e.g. in $prefix/libexec/macports/uninstall to simplify uninstalling.

This would also have the advantage of being able to remove the correct $applications_dir for the installation that is being removed.

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

Has duplicate #12799.

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

Ticket retargeted after milestone closed

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Replying to ryandesign:

2. MacPorts is not interactive, but you'd want to ask the user "Are you sure?"

This has changed; interactivity has since been added.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

True, but reason 1 that I mentioned above still applies so it's probably safer for there to be a separate standalone uninstaller script rather than trying to integrate it into the port executable.