Tales from the Engine Shed

I ran in to a problem recently where I had installed Subversion from source and then wanted to remove it again. As I hadn’t specified a target when I ran configure the files were installed in /usr/local and the developers helpfully do not support an uninstall target to make (and defend this position which to me made them look close-minded and unable to understand that they are writing software for other people to use and not themselves, but never mind).

With the help of someone on a mailing list finally being helpful and not arrogant towards someone else in my predicament a fairly foolproof way was devised:

cd /path/to/source/tree
make install DESTDIR=/tmp/qqq
cd /tmp/qqq
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -i -0 echo "{}" | cut -c 2- | less
This list can then be reviewed, found to be clean, and the software removed with:
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -i -0 echo "{}" | cut -c 2- | xargs -i rm "{}"
TaDa!

I realise this will not get the system back how it was, but it might mean I can get on with trying to build a Debian backport

Calendaring is a vital resource for most companies these days with large dependencies upon the ability to see and manage the time of other users - a PA will need to be able to add entries to other calendars, all team members need to know when other team members are free without necessarily seeing what they are doing so meetings can be scheduled and individual users want to be able to grant selective access to some entries and not others.

Microsoft Exchange coupled with Outlook provides this functionality but locks you in to a desktop and server operating system and application bundle which may not be ideal for the needs of the company. For instance I manage an Linux based infrastructure with desktops running either Linux or Windows. There is no scope for an Exchange server within our network and OpenExchange is not a valid option since we use qmail for all mail servers and don’t want one tool to do every job - instead, we want applications to do one thing and do it well, selecting the right tool for each job.

So where does this leave us when it comes to calendaring? Well currently we can only provide this level of calendaring to a subset of the company - those for whom calendaring is not just important but vital to their job. These users are tied in to Outlook on Windows and calendar sharing is provided by XC Connect - for the few exceptions to the Outlook rule the only option is a manually edited calendar through a rather clunky web interface. This system works (sort of - there are several frequently recurring bugs and annoyances) but is based on proprietary formats and protocols and does not provide cross platform interoperability (there are connectors available for Evolution and Entourage but I do not have access to Entourage and have never had the Evolution extension work properly).

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