Are there any CheckInstall side effects or should I use it every time?

Question

I'm using Ubuntu at work and Slackware at home.

Today at work I have downloaded some suspicious program from our company repository that was supposed to automate some repetitive tasks. I installed it with configure; make; make install. Now I want to remove it, but unfortunately there is no appropriate target for uninstalling in the Makefile. This program is written in Python and the installer copied many *.py files in various places and it's a pain now to remove all of them.

So I thought about CheckInstall to use in place of make install so I could easily remove such programs and keep track of all software on my system in the consistent way. But I wonder if there are any possible side effects related to CheckInstall or can it be used every time when I install new software? Are you using it?

Answer 1

I speak from experience only with deb/dpkg, but no, as long as Checkinstall succeeds in building a deb/rpm, there are no side-effects from installing that (there are scenarios where it will fail to build a package).

Of course, checkinstall doesn't really know about dependencies, so you'll have to have those available if you are planning to install the package anywhere. Otherwise, the uninstall functionality works exactly as intended.

If it doesn't work and you're wary of some package, a chroot is a (relatively) quick and painless way to try it out; a virtual machine is even better, but requires more setup time and resources unless you have one that duplicates your system lying around.