[derefr]

> Database people have done a lot of work on how to prevent inconsistent state, and we are stupid for not leveraging that.

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.

[int_19h]

Unfortunately, NTFS transactions have been deprecated.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/fileio/depr...