SOS!

[William Parducci]

> On Aug 20, 2018, at 10:17 AM, Christopher Jones <jonesc at hep.phy.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>> On 20 Aug 2018, at 4:03 pm, Lee Bast <x-lists at asgarda.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Aug 20, 2018, at 1045 , William Parducci <bill at parducci.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> For future reference NEVER issue sudo rm -rf in a multiline command. It is just asking for stuff like this to happen.
>> 	The guide (and a lot of MacPorts in general I guess) is more aimed at devs and power users so it kind of assumes everyone is comfortable with the CLI and knows basic footguns, but looking at that page it might be a reasonable idea to not just tell people to run a copy-pasted multiline sudo rm -rf command. It's a dangerous enough thing and it's a low bar to not say "copy and run this" and change it to "here are a list of MacPorts' file and directory locations, delete them for a full manual removal", then leave it to users.
> 
> Whilst I have myself pointed people at that page myself in the past, perhaps a case could be made that having a public web page with instructions that start with “sudo rm -rf “ is perhaps not the best idea. If the user copies the command badly, and doesn’t appreciate how powerful it can be, they could (and it seems have) run into problems.
> 
> Perhaps we should not have that command explicitly written there. Better yet perhaps and official ‘uninstaller’ that does the equivalent in a control manner would be better.

Another option for consideration is to put in a disclaimer along the lines of “DO NOT ATTEMPT UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS DOES AND THE RISKS INVOLVED.” on pages that have OS command line executables and/or recompose the commands to individual lines so as to—in theory—make them less prone to misapplication:

$ sudo rm -rf /opt/local
$ sudo rm -rf /Applications/DarwinPorts 
$ sudo rm -rf /Applications/MacPorts 
$ sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.* 
$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/DarwinPorts*.pkg 
$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/MacPorts*.pkg 
$ sudo rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup 
$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Tcl/darwinports1.0 
$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Tcl/macports1.0 
$ sudo rm -rf ~/.macports

b
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-users/attachments/20180820/e4cc5146/attachment.html>