Date:	Mon, 25 Nov 1996 13:20:29 +0200 (IST)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To:	nxk3 AT po DOT cwru DOT edu
Cc:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: Uninstalling components
In-Reply-To:	<slrn59ebaq.i5v.nxk3@b63526.student.cwru.edu>
Message-Id:	<Pine.SUN.3.91.961125131533.1592B-100000@is>
Mime-Version:	1.0

On 23 Nov 1996, Natarajan Krishnaswami wrote:

> Neither silently removing nor silently leaving the modified files
> seem particularly elegant solutions, IMHO.
> 
> I think it should leave the altered file in place but warn that it is part
> of a removed package (both to the screen and an install.log file).  Randomly
> deleting files is a BAD thing.  Is it really too much to examine all of
> the manifests and list other packages that provide the file?  If that is
> too slow, perhaps the installer could build a dependency list once
> and modify it when a package is added or removed.  

The *really* bad thing is for an optional package to overwrite a file 
that comes with the standard packages.  Once that happened, though, there 
is no clean way to undo the effect of the installation, unless you 
develop an installer which keeps a log of every file-oriented operation 
and can undo an arbitrary subset of those operations.  I'm not even sure 
this is possible on plain MSDOS, since there are way too many different 
ways to overwrite files and no standard method of telling interested 
packages that such a change has happened.

> On a similar vein, how about overwriting existing files from already-
> installed packages?  Z.B, if I modify my 2.0 specs, and upgrade to 2.01,
> it should prompt before overwriting with the specs from 2.01.  I should
> be able to save it under a different name and manually make the changes,
> if I desire to preserve my modifications.

Use a decent UnZip program (such as Info-Zip's) and it will let you do 
all of the above.

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