On 9/5/21 5:40 pm, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
On Sun, May 09, 2021 at 04:41:13PM +1000, Jon Gough wrote:
My conclusion is that application plugin mangers should make use of the
platform installation process for installing and uninstalling plugins as it
"the platform installation process" sounds like using debs, am I wrong?
No, in this case it is a deb.
would appear that 'deb' install packages cannot ever do a proper clean up of
software they have installed
This a) sounds worse than it is, b) is not specific to debs and instead
is true for all or almost all software installation ways out there, except
for heavily containerized things.
This hints that $HOME is not the correct location to put executable and
binary support data (non-user modifiable)
This is not true, browsers and things like IDEs do that all the time and
it works as expected.
However, leaving programs and binary non-user data on
the device is considered acceptable. This is an interesting concept for
phone and tablet devices which are resource constrained.
Users of space-constrained systems should clean up the files they no
longer need manually, preferably using tools that show the space
distribution.
Most users have no concept of how to do this, they just buy another
device because the old one is 'broken', i.e. is full of stuff they know
nothing about.
I now know what path I need to follow, i.e. have a plugin manager that uses
the platform installation process so that the uninstall process will work
and the packages and objects will be tracked.
If this means calling apt from a plugin manager then it's probably not the
best idea.
Not quite. The plugin manager needs to keep track of what it has
installed and where, then during the uninstall process it can be called,
if needed, to perform the cleanup as it would if the main program were
calling it to uninstall one or more plugins. In most instances the main
application is installed on devices that have only one user, i.e. phone,
tablet, etc.. Even when on a multi user device, i.e. windows, the device
is still only used by one account. If the uninstall process is run for
the main application any other account using the machine will have
issues if they expect the main application to still be there. So, in
this case uninstalling plugins during the main uninstall process would
not be a major issue. The config files/data would not be
uninstalled/removed by this process.
