Tiemo Hollmann wrote:
I can't provide a solution but can tell, that I see from time to time the
same behavior, using innosetup. Everything is deleted, except the empty
appfolder. Innosetup even has a section to define objects to delete after
everything, but this doesn't works also from time to time. It is the same,
if you uninstall the app from the control panel or the uninstaller from the
appfolder. The people in the inno uselist say, it's a windows problem and
there is no solution what I can change in innosetup. So I gave up some time
and keep it like that, knowing that windows keeps so much trash behind it...
Thanks for chiming in, Tiemo.
I don't know much about the innards of how InnoSetup works, but here the
issue was apparently resolved by changing the working directory. We
just went through a rather substantial round of testing on a wide
variety of Win systems including all three modern flavors (XP, Vista,
7), and in all cases the uninstall works well as long as we change the
working directory from the original to something else before deleting
that original.
This hypothesis appears to match what the OS is reporting, error 32
being "resource in use by another application", the other app being the
file manager. The file system maintains a working directory property
for each process, which is more or less what the LiveCode engine is
using with its internal representation of that, "the default folder".
On some Win systems (95 and 98; couldn't find this option in XP) there's
a field in the Properties window for an executable to set the initial
default folder. That pretty much does what we do in script when we "set
the default folder to...", changing the working directory for the process.
That was the clue that led me to explore changing the default folder,
and indeed so far it seems to be the answer, at least for my uninstaller.
The core issue is that the copy of the app which does the actual
installation was being launched by an app that, like any LC-based app
(and most others AFAIK), had its working directory set to the one it's
in. Since the copy is launched by that original, it's seen by the OS
as a sort of child process of that original, and the OS maintains its
record of that original working directory as a resource that's still in
use, even after that original app had quit, as long as that child
process (the copy) is running.
FWIW, Wise Install has always deleted everything you tell it without
exception in my 10 years of working with it, so while it's more
expensive than InnoSetup it may be a good option if that level of
tidiness is important to your customers.
As frustrating as computers can be sometimes, I try to maintain the
understanding that, being deterministic systems, it should be possible
to solve any problem with them. The trick is to identify the
differences between the working and non-working states, and then make
whatever changes are needed to make the non-working state mirror the
working one. Sure, Windows has issues, as do Mac and Linux, but most of
the time they work as described in their APIs.
In this case I had the advantage of a working state, Wise Install, so I
had the confidence it should be possible to solve this.
That said, this app has only been in the wild a few days now, so it's
probably fair to acknowledge that there's a chance we may encounter a
system on which our uninstall doesn't work completely.
But in the meantime this one seems resolved, and it might be useful to
know if InnoSetup is changing its working directory before attempting to
delete the folder in question. It may be necessary to change that
directory before launching the copy in tmp - that's what I did here, and
while I don't know if it would also work if I changed after launching
the copy, so far doing it as I have seems to solve the problem.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv
_______________________________________________
use-livecode mailing list
[email protected]
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
