How to completely remove self-compiled programs?

As we all know, software installed by pacman can be easily removed by
pacman -R softwarename
But if we download the source code from web, and install it by ourselves using
./configure
make
make install
Then if we want to delete it, how can we make sure that this is done completely? I mean, no junk files are left.
PS. Suppose we have deleted the source folder and cannot use
make uninstall

tomk wrote:
cyker - I read your question. You wanted to know what would happen if you put 'make install' in your build function. This indicates to me that you have little or no experience using makepkg to build Arch packages, because if you had, you would know what would happen if you did that. Every single piece of relevant documentation includes the recommendation repeated by flamelab earlier in this thread. I haven't read your tutorial, but I sincerely hope that you have included it too. I have my doubts though:
cyker wrote:Maybe DESTDIR is a good choice.
To summarise - you are looking for a solution to a problem that does not exist when a PKGBUILD is written correctly.
If everyone acts according to a give specification, that's fine. I won't post here. But sometimes you'll find badly-written install scripts that make compiled files scatter everywhere in your system. Of course you may make your system clean again by running make uninstall -- if
1. The author of the code successfully manage the details
2. You still have the source code(at least the makefile)
So initially my question has nothing to do with makepkg. I just wonder how to make the system clean if the source code, including the makefile, is lost. This makepkg tool is just proposed as a potential solution to my problem. But I tested it and found no mechanism is provided by makepkg to prevent make install writing files outside the building folder you want. So a badly-written makefile could still make your system a mess -- makepkg won't save that!
Even if PKGBUILD is written correctly, it is of no use. If the makefile want to write something elsewhere during installation, it still can do that.
I appreciate all of your answers. But my problem is based on a bad source code(perhaps makefile, but not PKGBUILD). Suppose, during make install, it will write junk files to /usr, /bin, /lib, etc. You don't want that happen, right? But you may not carefully read each line of the makefile of each software you install. I want a mechanism to make the whole compilation not generate files(final binaries and intermediate files and temporary files and config files) outside the building folder so that situation can be controlled. Or it will record each file generated in any methods so that when you want to delete them, you can delete them completely.
Last edited by cyker (2010-03-02 20:49:14)

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