[opensource-dev] Files deleted by uninstaller don't appear in Recycle Bin

Da5id Kronfeld da5idkronfeld at gmail.com
Wed Oct 27 13:18:07 PDT 2010


On 2010-10-27, at 7:45 AM, Kent Quirk (Q Linden) wrote:

> Au contraire. Some people get very upset when an installer leaves any files behind that were created by the program automatically, such as log files. It's simply not true that the uninstaller shouldn't remove anything in the profile -- I have worked at multiple companies where leaving behind any breadcrumbs (anything that wasn't created by File Save) after an uninstall was considered a major bug.

I disagree with this statement. On unix like systems it's standard practice to store user specific settings in a file or directory like ~/.thePackage . Just because someone removes/replaces/updates the software does not mean that *anything* should happen to the contents of that file or directory. It's even worse on systems with more than one user. 

I think that it's better to decouple the per-user settings and preferences from the package installation entirely. Just my $L0.02.


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