WARNING : Deinstall in SCO UNIX DANGEROUS!

[Robert J Woodhead]

I recently ran into the following nasty in SCO UNIX.  Having just installed
SCO TCP/IP I wanted to install SCO NFS.  Unfortunately, my machine didn't
have enough disk space.  Going into CUSTOM, I noticed that there were
several packages in the development system that I didn't need, like DOSDEV
and OS2DEV, so I decided to deinstall them.

This was, as they say, "A BAD IDEA!"

Upon trying to deinstall OS2DEV, CUSTOM reported an error.  I exited from
the program back into the SYSADMSH, and attempted to run CUSTOM again.
CUSTOM would not run.  I exited SYSADMSH and tried to run it again.  It
would not run.

The deinstallation had totally erased the entire of /usr (!!!!!!!)

Fortunately, I had backups.  Also, fortunately, TCP/IP was running and
we were able to copy the contents of /u (oh lucky me that all my work
files were not in /usr!) onto a remote machine.

A fax was dispatched to SCO 5 days ago.  As of yet, the denizens of
SCO technical support have not been heard from.  Needless to say, when
one shells out the serious $$ one must for SCO's products, one expects
support of a more prompt nature.

(I would like to point out that this is not the case with the reseller
who actually sold me SCO UNIX -- their tech support in this matter was
admirable.  Thanks LP...)

Things were trashed enough that I had to reinitialize the HD and reinstall
all the packages (sigh - an afternoon wasted).  I decided that this time
I would partially install the dev system.  There were a few bobbles because
SCO doesn't bother to mention the dependencies -- who would imagine that to
run the C compiler you need the XENIX 386 cross development libraries?

However, I did find it disturbing that doing a partial install of the
SCO development system partially DEINSTALLS the extended utilties of the
OS.  In order to get things to work, you must then re-install the utilities.

Did anyone at SCO ever bother to test their install/deinstall scripts?


-- 
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Robert J. Woodhead, Biar Games / AnimEigo, Incs.   trebor at foretune.co.jp |
| "The Force. It surrounds us; It enfolds us; It gets us dates on Saturday |
| Nights." -- Obi Wan Kenobi, Famous Jedi Knight and Party Animal.         |