[plt-dev] PLT interacts badly with crazy new Windows "AppData\Remote" idea

Can the uninstaller figure out enough to delete the shadow copies of
the plt tree for the user that is running the uninstaller? (Or am I
missing something?)

Robby

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> On May  4, Doug Williams wrote:
>> I got bitten by that back in 2008 - I have a blog entry (
>> http://drschemer.blogspot.com/2008/07/plt-scheme-on-vista.html)
>> about my problems from back then. And, I think this (
>> http://bugs.plt-scheme.org/query/?cmd=view&pr=9554) is the bug
>> report with an audit trail of e-mails.
>
> To summarize the problem: lots of windows applications want to write
> stuff in their directory, and this was almost always possible.  With
> the move to vista, they're trying to make things saner by protecting
> these directories (actually, the default user is not as powerful as it
> was on xp) -- and the result is that applications that expect to be
> able to write stuff this way get broken.  The UAC solution is to
> "divert" such writes to a user-local directory, so that when the
> program runs on behalf of that user it has the illusion that it can
> write there, only really it gets stored in the user directory,
> unaffecting other users or the system directory.  As expected, this
> works for many cases, and when it doesn't, the resulting confusion and
> mess is amazingly effective.  (Practically all of the problems that
> this leads to start with mysterious voodoo bug reports, which sound
> utterly confused and impossible to recreate.)
>
>
>> I'm not sure if the installer was ever updated to know about the shadow
>> copy. Eli and Matthew (and probably others) identified the problem.
>
> The installer (or uninstaller) cannot be fixed to deal with it -- as
> usual, the immediate way to see this is to consider a system with
> multiple users: if I uninstall, you won't like it if it makes the
> system delete your files.
>
> IIRC, there was some bit to set somewhere declaring that the
> application is well behaved, and just disable the UAC "feature", and
> I'm not sure if there were other problems in turning it on.
>
> --
>          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
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