[ ijbswa-Bugs-3487350 ] Unsafe uninstall deletion

Bugs item #3487350, was opened at 2012-02-13 09:48
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by fabiankeil
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Category: windows-specific
Group: version 3.0.19
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: 4h34d ()
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Unsafe uninstall deletion

Initial Comment:
Hi,

I had issues running Privoxy out of the box on Windows 7 using the default Program Files (x86) folder. So I decided to install it in My Documents. Unfortunately, I forgot to put Privoxy as the last directoy in the installation path, so I ended up using something like C:\Users\Username\My Documents. A few minutes after, I realized the files where in the latter directory, so I ran the uninstall file and... everything is gone, no way to recover anything :( Now I just hope I haven't lost so much...

I know it was my mistake to install Privoxy in the wrong directory but still I don't think it should assume to delete the whole installation directory (at least not without checking that the directory is empty), but rather just it's internal files and directories (some kind of whitelist deleting?).

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>Comment By: Fabian Keil (fabiankeil)
Date: 2012-02-13 12:05

Message:
Thanks a lot for the report. I'm sorry for your loss.

The described behavior seems surprising and non-intuitive to me, too.

I don't know what best-practices for a deinstaller on Windows are, but on
FreeBSD deinstalling a package is not supposed to remove any files or
directories unless they have been created by the package in question and
their content hasn't been modified later on.

This means that for example a modified Privoxy config file and the log file
should survive the deinstallation.

I do not know how much work implementing something similar for the Windows
packages would be, but it probably isn't trivial. Preventing the
installation into an already existing directory might be a workaround.

Lee, can you comment on this?

If the current behavior has to be kept, the installer and the documentation
should probably at least warn about it.

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