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by im3w1l
2816 days ago
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The reason applications spew files all over the place is because that's how you hook into other systems. Want a man-page? There's a folder for that. Want to autostart? Folder for that. Want your program to be runnable without specifying the full path? Put it in path. The reason configuration sucks is because we use filesystems, which are necessarily hierarchical, when we should use a more general database. If we had a table where the first column was "thing to be configured" and the second column was "program" things would be much better. We could query by the first column to get e.g. all programs that want to automatically start, or all programs in path. Or we could query the second column to get all configuration for a given program. Database people have done a lot of work on how to prevent inconsistent state, and we are stupid for not leveraging that. |
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It's kind of amusing that on the Windows side, you have a vertical integration between the filesystem (NTFS) and the update mechanism, where any MSI package will actually be installed in a filesystem transaction, such that if you e.g. cut power in the middle of package installation, then your disk will actually have nothing of the package's installed data on it. The transaction failed, and was rolled back.
And yet, even with that fancy tech in place, uninstallers still are manually-written apps that blow away files by explicitly naming them, rather than also taking advantage of these filesystem-level transactions together with some sort of hypothetical transaction WAL log, to reverse what the install did.