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Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:05:16 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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Subject: Re: setup.exe --quiet-mode
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Rob wrote:

> until you click the OK button. This clearly is not "unattended". It would be
> better if it could just exit with a specific error code that you could read and
> take some action (restart).

I agree that it's not correct, but I disagree about the conclusion.  It
should silently schedule any inuse files for replacement on the next
reboot, and continue.  Bailing in the middle of the process of unpacking
files is going to leave a horribly broken system: only some packages
that were selected are unpacked, others are not; and no postinstalls
were run.  You could have missing DLLs, things not installed properly,
etc.

At least if you schedule for replacement you can continue unpacking
everything else, and so the possible scenarios for a broken system are
much narrower and rarer.  Moreover if the user doesn't know to check the
exit status, they will have no idea of the level of brokenness.

I also want to point out that unattended installs are meant for people
that know what they're doing, they are not meant for casual users.  In
fact it's not even a officially supported mode of installation -- if it
works for you great, but it's not a primary feature.  Thus we're way off
in the woods here, in that running an unattended install and also not
closing all apps is kind of combining two already sketchy things.

Brian

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