Mail Archives: djgpp/1996/11/25/06:33:45
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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