Uninstaller question

[Richmond Mathewson]

Well, preumably the "clever" thing to do is to gave your standalone some 
unique name such as  "WildBoar.exe" or somesuch,
rather than a very pedesrian name such as "MyProg.exe" which risks 
having a twin.

Then you'll need a routine to search the end-user's system to find all 
examples of WildBoar.exe and delete them.

As you have pointed out, your executable may have been plonking log and 
pref files in various places: and it shouldn't
really matter where the end-user has stored the original executable; 
they should be in standard places determined by
your executable.

What I think you MUST do is make sure any log, temp and pref files have 
"speicies specific" names so that
your uninstaller can track them down, dlete them, and NOT delete the 
end-user's preferences for their
browser settings or what-have-ye.

--------------------------------

So . . .

1. Make your executable/standalone for whatever operating system(s) you 
are building it.

2. Set up a computer for each target OS with a virgin system and install 
your executable.

3. Find ALL the log, temp, cache and pref files your executable "strews" 
around the system
and write their names down and their usual locations.

4. Go on a 4 week holiday to recover from the large amount of work 
involved in doing that.

Richmond.


On 2/1/2018 3:33 pm, Graham Samuel via use-livecode wrote:
> Yes, that would be a bad strategy. I think anyway I wouldn’t be looking for stacks but for complied applications - the kind of stuff you get in the Applications folder on a Mac. If there were stacks, then for a runnable app they would be in very specific places (application support type folders). No, it’s the rogue executable I’m looking for…
>
> Thanks for the reply
>
> Cheers
>
> Graham
>
>> On 2 Jan 2018, at 13:45, Richmond Mathewson via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
>>
>> I suppose you would have to search the end-user's machine for all instances of "myStack.livecode", and that seems
>> a risky business as the end-user might have other LiveCode stacks on their machine that are needed to do something else.
>>
>> Richmond.
>>
>> On 2/1/2018 1:00 pm, Graham Samuel via use-livecode wrote:
>>> I’m developing a very simple uninstaller for a Mac app. I have an installer, thanks to DropDMG.
>>>
>>> The uninstallation process isn’t difficult - it’s just a matter of deleting all the involved files (some are slightly tricky to find, like dock aliases, but I guess there’s a way around that). But there’s one issue that I’m unsure about: what to do if the user has not obeyed the installer's instructions to place the app in the Applications folder, or has maybe got a beta copy that wasn’t installed using the installer, or has made a ‘spare’ copy somewhere on their hard disk which I don’t know about. I can’t see any way to detect these ‘rogue’ copies - can anyone else think of one? I know there are some big hitters in this area like CleanMyMac that claim to be able to find everything to do with an installed app, but I am not that ambitious - I just don’t want to miss anything obvious.
>>>
>>> Any help would be appreciated.
>>>
>>> Graham
>>>
>>> PS When I crack this, I’ll have to do the same thing for a PC version of the app. But first things first.
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