From Source (Ubuntu and Mac) tutorial build in /tmp confusing

[osrf-migration]

Original report (archived issue) by Robert Brothers (Bitbucket: rjb0026).

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I recently tried to build gazebo-9 from source based on the tutorial here and I noticed that this tutorial and all the tutorials for installing the dependencies from source tell you to download the source code and build it from the /tmp directory. Later they claim that the uninstall method is to go into the build directory and sudo make uninstall. However, if you have to reboot at any time in between building and uninstalling, the build directory gets wiped.

I'm not sure what the reason is building in the /tmp directory, but maybe there is a good reason and explanation could be added to the tutorial.

I'm still having issues with my source install and I documented it here.

[osrf-migration]

Original comment by Jose Luis Rivero (Bitbucket: Jose Luis Rivero, GitHub: j-rivero).

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The cleanup of /tmp on reboot is something completely in hand of every distributions or platform.

The documentation has some steps ready for installing the software into the system (/usr). It is true that during the process if you need to reboot the computer, your system configuration is going to kill the work. I'm not sure if it worth it to mention, but please feel free to provide a pull request with your proposed change against the tutorial.

[osrf-migration]

Original comment by Louise Poubel (Bitbucket: chapulina, GitHub: chapulina).

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I think we could just tell users to install somewhere else, like ~/ or ~/code. Besides the uninstall issue above, people who are installing from source often want to make changes to the software and contribute them back, but if it's under /tmp all will be wiped out.