Windows has had an installer as an OS component since the late 90s (called Windows Installer). As a sysadmin I'd prefer apps use it. Many application developers do not. It's maddening. (Doubly so when Microsoft themselves don't use it-- newer versions of Office, Teams, etc. Microsoft suffers from too much NIH.)
I get unattended installs and uninstalls "for free" when well-behaved applications use Windows Installer. Patching is included, too. Customizing installations is fairly straightforward.
On the developer side it has historically used a very quirky proprietary file format (MSI) with a fairly steep learning curve and a ton of "tribal knowledge" required to make it work for all but the most trivial cases. (Though, to be fair, most installs are the trivial case-- copy some files, throw some stuff into the registry, make some shortcuts.)
Worse, it allows for arbitrary code execution ("Custom Actions"), at which point all bets are off re: unattended installs, removal, etc. Some Windows Installer packages are just "wrapped" EXEs (Google Chrome, for example).
I've packaged a ton of 3rd party software as Windows Installer packages. It's an ugly system with lots of warts and legacy crap, but if you need to load an application on a large number of Windows PCs reliably unattended it's decently fit for purpose.
There is reasonable free and libre tooling to generate MSI packages from plain text source (the WiX toolkit) and it can be used in a CI pipeline.
Can confirm. I would be considered by most to have been a Windows Installer expert at one point. Installshield / Wix / Whatever else.
It is intentionally obtuse at times (MSIFileHash table uses rearranged MD5 hashes for example), and also many features made sense for the late 90's/Early 2000's era where bandwidth was low and connectivity limited, and lots of stuff was distributed on CD's. The look on people's faces when you explain advertisement to them the first time... How their unrelated app can get stuck in a loop of repair for a piece of unrelated software...
It was deprecated by the newer AppX/MSIx/AppV format which uses sandboxes, binary chunks/streaming and no executable code to install stuff.
For my own desktop computing, I prefer MSI packages because I prefer having control post-install to tinker with things if I feel like it. Also, I have the skillset to modify the installer to my whims if I so choose.
> It was deprecated by the newer AppX/MSIx/AppV format which uses sandboxes, binary chunks/streaming and no executable code to install stuff.
I can offer a little perspective on MSIX, having devoted months of my life to it in a past job.
MSIX is nearly unusable outside the Store. It will work in a tightly controlled environment, but when you try to deploy it to a wide variety of users you will run into 1) unhelpful errors that basically can't be diagnosed, 2) enterprise environments that cannot/will not allow MSIX installs. I get the impression that the MSIX team is uninterested in solving either of those issues.
It's not a coincidence that virtually no first-party teams use MSIX to install their product outside the Store. Office tried for a while and eventually gave up.
Despite all that, there are still a few people at MS who will tell you that MSIX is the future. I don't really understand it and I assume there's a weird political reason for this.
MSIX can be made to work in that context. We've done it, although it required writing our own installer EXE stub that invokes the package management API rather than using Microsoft's own "App Installer" app, and doing lots of remote diagnosis to solve the mysterious bugs you were hitting. I would indeed not recommend anyone try to use it with Microsoft's own tooling.
Still, when you finally make it work you get a lot of benefits. MSI is clearly dead end tech which is why so many MSIs are just installer EXEs wrapped in the file format. It doesn't have any clear path to modern essentials like online updates, keeping the OS clean, sandboxing and so on. If you were on the Windows team, what would you say the future was?
For enterprise environments it's actually somewhat the opposite: MSIX packages can be installed without admin privileges due to their declarative nature, and it's very easy for admins to provision MSIXs to Active Directory groups because they don't have to do any repackaging work. Yes, some admins have hacked Windows to stop it working because when MS launched the Store they didn't provide any way for admins to opt out, but these days they have the knobs they need. Also, because they're just zips you can always just unzip them into your home directory to get at the app inside. It won't auto update that way, but as long as EXEs can run from the home dir it can work.
Products like Office and Visual Studio have entire teams devoted to nothing but their installers, which is clearly going too far in the opposite direction. Most products won't want to do that.
The joke is, Microsoft devs even now use NSIS for things like VSCode rather than deal with MSIs lol
But there is the modern implementation of AppX Bundles which was later extended to create MSIX which allows app distribution without the windows store.
There are still drawbacks to using MSIX usually because you want to touch Windows in ways you can't inside the sandbox.
To my understanding, MSIX today supports the full MSI catalog and will do entirely unsandboxed (unattended [0]) installs if you want it to. But you need to understand all the same complexity of MSI to build installers in it. The biggest remaining difference MSIX and MSI is an MSI is a strange nesting doll of ancient binary database formats that is tough to build (which is why WiX exists and is part of why WiX is so complex) whereas MSIX is "just" an ordinary ZIP bundle of your files plus XML manifests. With the final punchline being that those XML manifests have yet another dialect from WiX's ancient MSI-database-influenced XML and of course it also isn't as simple as deleting the WiX compiler and just zipping a WiX project.
In my experience, you can pretty easily write the nice sandboxed MSIX manifests by hand, it's not too bad, but general MSIX doing weird MSI things you still want better more expensive tools to build them (and of course Microsoft themselves still don't exactly provide that and will point you to plenty of expensive third party installer studios for options, many of which are the exact same ones people have been overpaying for decades).
[0] The one complaint I'm aware of is that you can't do custom installer UI and "attended" installs with user choices. There's one MSIX UI and it is barebones but acceptable. That's all you get.
> Doubly so when Microsoft themselves don't use it
Often, as you mentioned, Windows Installer packages are wrapped by an executable (in WiX this is called a "bundle" because you may also choose to add redistributables like the C++ runtime).
However, what you see in installations like SQL Server, Office and Visual Studio is that the installers are bundles as well - of a large amount of MSIs that need to be installed and uninstalled in a specific order. A single Microsoft Installer package is transactional and can be rolled back on failure, but bundles are not as well defined and left open to the implementation of the bundle. Windows Installer does not reach beyond the single msi package.
I had a friend who worked for a company that specialized in Web browser bars and MSIs. In other words, they were a shop to put all kinds of malware into these things. It was a viable business model for a company of something like 50 people.
The whole story and ideas put into Windows installing programs are a stupid joke. It's designed by project managers who have no idea what they are doing and no imagination and is executed by the cheapest least motivated programmers from South Asia Microsoft can possibly find.
A lot of people who do useful stuff for Windows try to stay away from as much of Microsoft's stuff as possible, and integrate it as little as possible with anything else coming from the system because it's just maddening how horrible everything there is.
A lot of weird things in windows are reflections of the gestalt in the 90's and early 2000. People went all in on all sort of OOP-derived weirdness, like CORBA, COM.
"Plain-Text files for configuration? what do you think we are? savages? no, we need a hierarchical registry! every serious program must use some opaque binary format to store stuff!" seem to be the general animus at that time. Nowadays, even if you really hated the idea of a text files for configuration in your home direction, people would probably do something more straight-forward like using a SQLite db.
Agreed re: some of the Windows "strangeness". I think there was some amount of needlessly "Enterprise" architecting going on at MSFT back in the day.
There were also very practical solutions incorporated to accommodate the constraints of the hardware of the time that come off looking like needless complexity today, too. (There's also, arguably, some laziness in the old binary file formats that were nothing more than dumps of in-memory structures. That's a common story across a ton of old software-- not just MSFT.)
Rob Mensching, who worked at Microsoft on Windows Installer pre-release, has a nice blog post about internals of MSI.[0] He goes into some of the overwrought architecture in MSI, as well as quirks to overcome performance limitations in a world of floppy disk-based distribution and much smaller memory capacities. It's a good read.
Wix is part of the problem. It's basically making money for the developers who offer consultancy for it.
Therefore the documentation is poor , like the absolute worst I've ever seen. Opening issues for doc issues never results in anything. Pointing out UX issues is usually shot down. Finally, until this year you needed .net 2 installed to build it, which does not play well with windows docker.
I don't think any major desktop OS handles this well.
I suspect the final form for software installation is probably where iOS and Android are going in the EU, where there's a single means of installing software to the device so that everything can be sandboxed properly, but the acquisition/update process can be pointed to a URL/Store that the user has pre-approved.
macOS comes pretty close to what I'd ideally want in an OS with regards to installation - independent packages that are certified/notarised, but I'd like to see the OS allow for user-specified authorities beyond just Apple. That being said, I'm not sure I'd ever use them as it's part of what I'm paying Apple for, I'm really thinking more of Linux there.
A kind of flatpak/snap approach, but that has signing of the package and centralised management of the permissions for the sandbox at an OS level would be ideal in my view. That way it's still free-as-in-speech as the user can specify which notarisation authority to use (or none at all).
I really don't understand why seperate programs are handling removing their mother program in 2023, that's registry spaghetti messy.
Everyone is pointing at Windows but there are still installer software on MacOS. Normally crusty old corpoware like Citrix that needs to extend its tentacles to the whole system.
On Unix/Linux land the prevalence of pipe curl to bash type installers is not much different.
I normally keep both types away from my computers.
> On Unix/Linux land the prevalence of pipe curl to bash type installers is not much different.
This is a problem but only if you install software on Linux by manually going to the project page and copy-pasting whatever curl they have there, I think the difference is that mostly you're encouraged to go the package manager route, whereas on windows downloading .exes directly (ala the curl example) is the norm.
It seems to be increasingly the case that package managers just don't have some software - or have a version that's years out of date. Perhaps the number of different ones available has become self-defeating.
Directly sudoing a curl-ed script is like running a binary on Windows with admin permissions and with Defender turned off, which makes it somewhat more scary to me.
On Windows I use Chocolatey when I can, and if I can't (or it looks dodgy anyway) I'll either just not install it or try it in a sandbox. Things that aren't choco-able are generally commercial software obtained from the vendor's download page, we theoretically trust those things somewhat. YMMV.
> Directly sudoing a curl-ed script is like running a binary on Windows with admin permissions and with Defender turned off,
Most people would just say yes to any prompt they get, those wise enough not to aren't running random curl scripts either.
As for Defender being any kind of protection, I have my doubts.
> it seems to be increasingly the case that package managers just don't have some software - or have a version that's years out of date.
This is entirely distro dependant, some are very up to date and have most things you'd want, especially if you include the likes of AUR in that. But then there's usually a Flatpak or an AppImage that you can use in the odd case that they don't.
Actually no, the problem with curl | bash is that it can be detected on the server, so if the server is compromised, it can serve you malware and you will never know about it. It is safe(r) to curl > file, inspect the file, then execute it under bash.
Yes there are a few certificate authorities. For example DigiCert, SSL.com and others. You can also create your own e.g. for enterprise deployments. Or you could even set up a public CA if you wanted to, the process is standardized.
So whilst Microsoft will sign for you if you distribute via their store, otherwise you pay per year for certificates and can distribute outside the store.
There are problems with the system (cost, bugs, usability problems) but it is decentralized.
> macOS comes pretty close to what I'd ideally want in an OS with regards to installation - independent packages that are certified/notarised, but I'd like to see the OS allow for user-specified authorities beyond just Apple.
It's easy to run unsigned binaries/app packages on macOS: right click on the .app, hold down Option, then click Open and confirm the warning.
I would also like this option. I see why Apple finds it undesirable though. Software installation safeguards are a game of whack-a-mole with (e.g.) support scammers who ask grandma/Lee-in-accounting/Cindy-next-door to naively click through all the warnings.
The closest Apple comes to this capability is achieved via device Supervision and MDM, which might be comfortable for some of us here in this forum but obviously isn’t practical beyond more technical circles.
Baddies keep ruining all the fun for the rest of us.
> Baddies keep ruining all the fun for the rest of us.
IMHO the blame rather lies with our politicians who are unwilling to take the steps necessary to cut the baddies off from the Internet. Let's see just how fast India, Pakistan, Turkey and other scammer hotspots clean up their act when the US+EU threaten to cut them off from the Internet and SS7 unless the scam callcenters are closed down for good... the amount of corruption regularly exposed by scambaiters on Youtube is insane. Billions of dollars of damages each year [1] from that bullshit and our politicians don't. fucking. care.
I’m more than a little skeptical that scams would be less of a problem if specific countries cracked down on large operations. For one thing it’s not clear how you’d ever get the whole world on board. Pressuring India is hard enough, try Myanmar, a place that doesn’t get along with the West at all and is already a hotspot for phone scams targeting Chinese speakers. And if centralized, relatively open operations overseas were no longer possible, it would likely become more like other types of fraud run by local gangs. So I’m all for pressuring India to crack down on scammers, but I don’t see how that would reduce the desire to tighten software controls on PCs.
> For one thing it’s not clear how you’d ever get the whole world on board.
You don't need the whole world. The Western world is enough - no Internet and phone service (both easily enforced by requiring providers to reject ASNs / phone country codes) means a lot of lost business for an affected country.
> Pressuring India is hard enough, try Myanmar, a place that doesn’t get along with the West at all and is already a hotspot for phone scams targeting Chinese speakers.
Honestly, that's China's problem to solve.
> So I’m all for pressuring India to crack down on scammers, but I don’t see how that would reduce the desire to tighten software controls on PCs.
When software vendors don't have to gate more and more features behind more and more obnoxious bullshit simply to whack-a-mole scammers, they won't.
Is it? I prefer to tackle problems at the source, and its crystal clear that overseas scammers are exploiting corrupt local law enforcement in conjunction with easy access to targets via the Internet and shady telephone providers.
There is no Pareto optimal unicorn that provides both a democratized marketplace of software with low barriers to entry and an ironclad guarantee of security against compromise of personal user information. These two are fundamentally at odds. If anyone can produce and distribute software easily on a given platform, then so can people with malicious intent.
> I suspect the final form for software installation is probably where iOS and Android are going in the EU, where there's a single means of installing software to the device so that everything can be sandboxed properly, but the acquisition/update process can be pointed to a URL/Store that the user has pre-approved.
Basically how Linux distributions works since the beginning. Tough at the start the installation source was not remote but a CD-ROM things didn't change.
You have a repository of packages (that can be on a local source as a CD or remote source such as an HTTP/FTP server), that have some sort of signature (on Linux usually the pagkage is signed with GPG) with some keys that the user trusts (and the default are installed on the system), and a software that allows to install, uninstall and update the packages.
Android/iOS arrived later, but they didn't invent anything.
iOS is the gold standard IMO. Apps are sandboxed, can only interact with the outside world via APIs (that the user needs to approve), one click uninstall and it’s all gone without a trace (at least in theory). Love it.
I think Android does it better with third party store and sideload support. It seems that iOS depends some security to their own the AppStore. (example: disallow dynamic code generation like JIT)
If it provides a framework for installers/uninstallers, it'll be fighting the inertia of decades of legacy software, programmer habits, and old tutorials.
If it tracks file ownership by program, it might accidentally delete user files. How would it differentiate between a VSCode extension that should be uninstalled, and a binary compiled with VSCode for a user project? A false positive could be catastrophic.
If it restricts what programs can do to accurately track file ownership, you end up with Android. Which is fantastic for security, but is a royal pain in the ass for all parties:
- The app developers have to jump through hoops for the simplest actions, and rewrite most of their code in the new style.
- The operating system has to implement a ton of scaffolding, like permissions-restricted file pickers and ways to hand off "intents" between applications.
- The user is faced with confusing dialogs, and software with seemingly arbitrary limitations.
In the age of shared runtimes, auto-updaters, extension marketplaces, and JIT compilers, managing installed applications is harder than ever.
Edit: the answer above applies only to Windows, because of its baggage. Linux'es are in a much better position, for example, though their solution is still not perfect.
Define a separate directory for program installations, that user processes cannot write to. Only program that can do so is the package manager, which other programs can call to install packages. Uninstall removes everything related to a program from this directory.
> In the age of shared runtimes, auto-updaters, extension marketplaces, and JIT compilers, managing installed applications is harder than ever.
The only reason these make things hard is that windows lacks any facility to deal with them. Solutions going forward: Outright ban having your own auto-updater, to auto-update you register your program and where to update it from with the package manager. Shared runtimes are trivial for package managers to handle, it's just a package that many other ones depend on. Extensions can be handled as packages.
I agree with you, now for completeness I should mention that Linux package formats usually allow packagers to provide arbitrary pre- and post- install shell scripts ran as root.
(which means that if you don't trust a provider, not only it's not safe to run the program, but it's also unsafe to install it)
The only difference is that you usually trust the repo in Linux, but that’s a pretty significant “only thing,” in the sense that the repo is already the source of your whole system, so it better be trustworthy!
The "elegant" way of distributing 3rd party software for Linux is to ask the user to add your APT/RPM/[...] repo to their system. And most Linux distro maintainers anyway don't vouch for software in the main repos, beyond basic install-ability. The Debian project for example definitely doesn't do in-depth security analysis of every package in the repos: they just check the license, re-package it, and keep an eye on security updates in upstream.
Right. You should generally never install a proprietary software package provided by the vendor in RPM, DEB, or similar. What keeps the use of those hooks safe is purely social convention and review internal to the Linux distribution, and vendors routinely use those hooks to do unacceptable things.
If you must install proprietary software on your Linux system, either package it yourself or use something like Flatpak or Snap (or even AppImage).
Hopefully in the future vendors will increasingly move to providing well-sandboxed Flatpak packages by default.
packages are cryptographically signed by the packager, by the way on Debian you add the key when you install a new repository. The signature tells you "This package has been built by X and has not been tempered in the meantime", not "X and this package are not malicious, I promise".
> you have the option to abort the install of an untrusted package before it does something malicious
How do you do this in practice?
If I run apt install p or or dpkg -i p.deb, the thing is installed. APT asks you for confirmation if it has to install additional dependencies but that's it.
I don't have no guaranty such like for any package, I can install it without worrying something bad won't happen during its installation.
Of course you should not install untrusted packages, but still.
The same could not be said if the package format didn't have anything to specify arbitrary install scripts.
I'm going to assume you are talking about rpm and deb packages since they are still currently the dominant installation packages on Linux.
> Define a separate directory for program installations, that user processes cannot write to. Only program that can do so is the package manager, which other programs can call to install packages.
Windows does this. Programs are installed in directories under "C:\Program Files" which is only writable with elevated system rights.
> Uninstall removes everything related to a program from this directory.
rpm and debs don't install all the files needed for a program in a single directory. They are scattershot all over the file system and in many of these directories comingled with files from other programs. Windows comes closer than Linux in this regard since it does create the directory under "C:\Progtam Files" which while unfortunately doesn't always contain all the required files usually contains the vast majority.
This is exactly how AppX/MSIX packages work, with C:\Program Files\WindowsApps (by default) being pretty substantially locked down. They even use filesystem/registry virtualization by default to isolate packages even further from each other. They also have solutions for framework packages and extensions though I haven't tried those out and suspect they have annoying practical limitations around edge cases.
Of course, a decade later almost nobody uses those because they botched the rollout by limiting AppX to the Microsoft Store and an entirely new poorly documented and very restrictive set of windows APIs and app frameworks. They've made huge progress on all of those problems with MSIX to the point that it's a reasonably good and easy to use choice for most apps with some neat benefits like updates only downloading the changes between versions. Of course if your app pushes the boundaries of the sandbox or capabilities or runs into a bug it becomes a huge pain.
I don't think MSIX is a good choice for most apps. With a decent-sized user base, you will have a lot of people who run into undiagnosable errors with MSIX or can't use it because they're in locked-down enterprise environments.
I think Affinity Photo's experience with MSIX is instructive; hundreds of negative results on their forum, eventually they had to back down and provide a non-MSIX installer (and at that point do ya really want to maintain 2 separate Windows installers?)
That was the first option, "provides a framework for installers/uninstallers".
But what would you do with the millions of existing programs, most unmaintained? And what about programs with strong opinions on update schedules, or built-in extension marketplaces?
It's easy to solve this problem if your first step is "replace every program".
Windows without backwards compatibility is a dead end because the only reason why Windows exists is backwards compatibility and the existing user base. As an OS it is decades behind all its competitors, with a 30yo filesystem, file locking ridiculousness (which is why uninstallers and updates end up being so complex and require reboots), an antiquated central registry for settings that ends up slowing the system down over time, and a security framework so broken that you need anti-malware software running and inspecting every little thing happening on your system or you're easily compromised (everything is executable by default).
The security situation is so bad at this point that you can't trust any Windows benchmarks anymore. The benchmark suite will run on a "bare" Windows system; probably with updates and Windows Defender disabled and many other system services stopped to maximize performance and prevent background services from slowing everything down. The reality though is that on a regular user desktop all these things and a whole lot more will be enabled, resulting in vastly degraded performance compared to the benchmarks. The end user experience sucks.
Now they're forcing ads down your throat and pestering you at every turn to use more Microsoft software (e.g. trying to get you to use Edge). They've also recently included UI changes in "essential" system updates that can't easily be reverted or undone, breaking people's workflows. It's anti-user insanity and it's all because Microsoft can't actually go back to the drawing board with Windows anymore because the alternatives are just too good.
After using a Linux desktop full-time for a while, going back to Windows feels like going from having modern plumbing to pooping in the woods.
In the same way 'Linux' (in the widest sense of the term, i.e. Linux distributions like Debian) handles this. User data is not touched by the (un)installer, configuration files are checked for changes from the package default and left alone unless explicitly purged. Files which do not belong to any package are left alone as well so that binary compiled with VSCode for a user project will not be touched:
warning: while removing directory /splurge/blargle/buzz not empty so not removed
This has worked fine for decades and is one of the areas where those Linux distributions were and are ahead of the competition. It works fine because the package manager has clearly delineated responsibilities and does (or rather should) not go outside of those. Do not expect the package manager to clean up your home directory for you, that is not part of its duty.
> In the age of shared runtimes, auto-updaters, extension marketplaces, and JIT compilers, managing installed applications is harder than ever.
Most auto-updaters should be disabled on systems with functioning package management - Thanks Firefox but I'll update my browser through either the package manager as I prefer my executables to be read-only for users.
Some packages - the whole Javascript rats' nest being a good example - move too fast to be usefully packaged by volunteer maintainers so those are relegated to a different area which is not touched by the package manager. Other packages - anything Python fits here - are such a tangled mess of mutually incompatible versioned spaghetti that they are hard to fit inside the idiom of package managers so they get their own treatment - python -m venv ... etc. These are the exceptions to the rule that package management can be made to work well. By keeping those exceptions in areas where the package manager does not go - e.g. your home directory - the two can and do coexist without problems.
It's called MSI, and it's been in Windows for 20 years.
The issue is that MSI is very buggy when handling explorer extensions. If you're not careful, when you uninstall it'll prompt you to close explorer.
(I know because I shipped a product that installed via MSI and had an explorer plugin. The installer issues were more complicated than the plugin.)
In this case, the issue is that when explorer loads a plugin, it keeps an open file handle to the dll. This gives the installer two options: Restart explorer.exe, or somehow finish uninstalling when explorer.exe terminates.
The product that I shipped just restarted explorer.exe.
You can use them in combination with the vscode-with-extensions function to create a VSCode package that bundles in whatever extensions you declare: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code
Yes, that is what I mean by my last point: "It allows for portable installations and to run software just copied from other sources." You can think of decompressing from an archive as running a very simple installation program.
If the only installer available was one provided by the OS how long do you think it would take to make that the only way to install and run software. These things are being done right now on many platforms in the name of safety, security, and to a lesser extent convenience.
The more phone-like a platform is the fewer ways you have to install and run software on it. So far general purpose computers still allow you to install software in other ways than the built-in method (i.e. just unzip and place in a directory), but it's getting increasingly common to require executables be signed, and things are always moving to be more and more locked down.
Now the use of "Special" installers/uninstallers is from the original comment, I would just refer to them as "regular" installers/uninstallers. I do like the ability and freedom to have an ecosystem of these things, as I don't want the one OS method to be the only way to install applications.
>If the only installer available was one provided by the OS
There's the non-sequitur. OP never said that this is what should happen. It is strange to leap to this assumption while also wanting to define portable programs and archives as 'installers'.
In the context of Windows, 'special' installers means the programs you run to be able to use a different program that don't appear on other OSes.
I did not define portable programs and archive extractors as installers, just suggested the act of decompressing to a directory or copying to a directory would be considered as installing the program.
In principle I have no objection with those options as I've had to use all of them given the nature of the Windows ecosystem.
The trouble is that MS never paid much attention to tracking and cleaning up after installations or after uninstallers has finished. Often this doesn't matter but when something seriously goes wrong untangling the mess can be almost impossible, it's often easier to reinstall Windows and usually much quicker (that's if one has a simple installation).
Unfortunately, my installations aren't simple so I take snapshots at various stages of the installion—stage-1 raw install with all drivers, stage-2 essential utilities, and so on. By stage-4, I have a basic working system with most of my programs. Come the inevitable Windows stuff-up I reinstall from a backup image, it's much quicker than starting from scratch.
Between those major backups, I use the registry backup utility ERUNT, it not only takes registry snapshots on demand but also automatically backs up the registry on a daily basis. This, I'd venture, is the most important utility I've ever put on a Windows computer, I cannot recall how many times it's gotten me out of trouble.
Just several days ago I had a problem reinstalling an update to a corrupted Java jre/runtime. Nothing I did would make the installer install as the earlier installation was not fully uninstalled, thus log files etc. weren't a help.
In the end I had to delete the program dir and other Java files I could find, same with registry entries. As expected, this didn't work, as I hadn't found everything.
Knowing the previous version number of Java I did a string search across the OS and found another half dozen or so Java files. Retried the install again and it still failed. I then ran ERUNT which replaced the registry with an earlier pre-Java one and the install now worked. This still meant that some programs that were added later, LibreOffice for example, had to be reinstalled to update the registry.
If I hadn't had ERUNT installed I'd have had to go back to reinstalling an earlier partition backup. And if I'd not had those then I'd have been in real trouble.
That's the short version. Fact is, Windows is an unmitigated mess when it comes to installations. Why can't I force an installer to complete even with faults? Why doesn't Windows remember exactly what happens during an installation so it can be easily undone?
_
Edit: if you've never used ERUNT and decide to do so, always ensure you shut Windows down and restart it after installing a backup registry before you do anything else—that's in addition to the mandatory reboot required to install the backup.
You may have multiple registry backups and decide the version you've just loaded wasn't the one you want. Loading another without this additional reboot [refresh] will blue-screen the O/S. You'll then have to install the backup manually and that's very messy.
It is, these days. Windows 10 onwards has a native package format called MSIX that somewhat resembles packages on Linux. They're special zips containing an XML file that declares how the software should be integrated into the OS (start menu, commands on the PATH, file associations etc). Windows takes care of installation, update and uninstallation.
The system is great, in theory. In practice adoption has been held back by the fact that it was originally only for UWP apps which almost nobody writes, and also only for the MS Store. These days you can use it for Win32 apps outside the store but then you will hit bugs in Windows. And packages must be signed.
Still, the feature set is pretty great if you can make it work. For example you can get Chrome-style updates where Windows will keep the app fresh in the background even if it's not running. And it will share files on disk between apps if they're the same, avoid downloading them, do delta updates and more. It also tracks all the files your app writes to disk outside of the user's home directory so they can be cleanly uninstalled, without needing any custom uninstaller logic.
One interesting aspect of the format is that because it's a "special" (read: weird) kind of zip, you can make them on non-Windows platforms. Not using any normal zip tool of course, oh no, that would be too easy. You can only extract them using normal zip tools. But if you write your own zip library you can create them.
A couple of years ago I sat down to write a tool that would let anyone ship apps to Win/Mac/Linux in one command from whatever OS they liked, no harder than copying a website to a server. I learned about MSIX and decided to make this package format. It took us a while to work around all the weird bugs in Windows that only show up on some machines and not others for no explicable reason, but it's stable now and it works pretty well. For example you can take some HTML and JS files, write a 5 line config file pointing at those files, run one command and now you have a download page pointing to fully signed (or self signed) self-updating Windows, Mac and Linux Electron app. Or a JVM app. Or a Flutter app. Or any kind of app, really! Also IT departments love it because, well, it's a real package format and not an installer.
Writing more about this tech has been on my todo list for a while, but I have now published something about the delta update scheme it uses which is based on block maps, it's somewhat unusual (a bit Flatpak like):
> For example you can get Chrome-style updates where Windows will keep the app fresh in the background even if it's not running
Considering the ability to update itself is a requirement of Cyber Resilience Act in EU, I foresee a big uptick in usage (and app stores usage of course).
Besides the "special uninstaller" thing. One of the things I hate the most with Windows filesystem management compared to Unix-like OSes.
On Windows, opening a file locks it. So you can't delete a program that is running, you will get an error. It means of course that an executable can't delete itself without resorting to ugly tricks like the one mentioned in the article. That's also why you get all these annoying "in use" popups.
On Unix, files (more precisely: directory entries) are just reference-counted pointers to the actual data (inode on Linux), removing a file is never a problem: remove the pointer, decrement the reference counter. If the file wasn't in use or referenced from elsewhere, the counter will go to zero and the actual data will be deleted. If the file is in use, for example because it is an executable that is running, the file will disappear from the directory, but the data will only be deleted when it stops being in use, in this case, when the executable process terminates. So you can write your uninstaller in the most straightforward way possible and it will do as expected.
I feel like this is some stupid question but aren't exexutables and their libraries loaded to RAM? If yes then why can't it just delete itself (from disk)?
I don't know the details but I think executable files are mapped into memory, and needed sections are loaded on demand. In case the system is low on RAM, little used sections can be evicted, to be reloaded the next time they are needed. This requires the file to be present on disk.
The ~/.whatevertheyfeellike is an antipattern (that is annoying) but the others are well defined in the xdg_desktop spec[0].
Personally I appreciate knowing where the config/cache for each application is. (Though it does annoy me when programs don't follow this as in your third example)
It usually doesn't, and it's mostly a good standards recommendation that even the most GPL of GPL codebases doesn't always follow (looking at you, emacs).
Software specifications are usually adopted by convention and implemented to minimize surprise and make things interoperable. They are not authorities and cannot make anyone do anything. One of the most common software failure modes is to implement a specification too tightly or in a way that nobody wants although the reverse is a problem as well.
They don't. XDG specifications are recommendations. Their only power is that your software will integrate poorly with other software (specially desktop software) if you ignore their guidelines.
I would disagree, files that the user cannot edit or should not edit should not be going into their home directory. Things like cache files should go into a system wide cache directory instead.
Isn't that very anti-linux though, to have a directory owned by root but populated with subfolders owned by other users? /home is the only exception I can think of that does this.
True, but /usr/home is no longer a common place to store home directories. It used to be, particularly in Bell Labs Unix. (Does FreeBSD still do this?)
The Linux Foundation’s File Hierarchy Standard puts user homes in /home, but it’s by no means mandatory.
/home being the *nix home folder directory isn’t written in stone, but plenty of software expects it. Of course you shouldn’t hard code things like that, but that has never stopped anyone from doing it. (Not that we should reward that with de facto standards necessarily.)
I understand the various reasons why a root file system hierarchy isn’t part of the Single UNIX Specification, but it might have been nice.
If I uninstall ssh I still want to have have my authorized hosts. If I uninstall some firefox version firefox I want to keep my profiles. XDG defines a thumbnailing hierarchy followed by multiple libraries, uninstalling any of those shouldn't clear thumbnail caches.
Persistent user-specific state needs to live in a persistent user-specific location. You could choose not to use the concept of a home directory, but you would be doomed to reinvent it.
The fact that nobody does that is pretty much a consequence of the difficulty of coordinating multiple projects that do not have a common authority, not because it is a bad idea.
I agree cache file should not go into their home directory, however I don't agree they aren't user data and that they would be part of the software installation.
That is not part of the software itself so it is still correctly installed/uninstalled.
Now I believe all software should have a manpage, dialog and a cli argument that describes where all the files[1] generated by default go but that is another subject.
MSIX packaged apps do support this, Windows redirects file writes outside of home dirs and other user locations to a package-specific directory that's overlayed back onto the system so the app thinks it's writing to wherever, but it's actually a package-private location.
> you can query any file to see which package owns it
Presumably you mean something like using dpkg/apt for a Debian-style system?
I think that only works if a file is actually installed from within the framework. As soon as you've installed a file via npm, flatpak, pip, snap, specialist plug-in, standalone binary, that ancient program you had to install by hand, or one of the other squillions of ways of getting an executable program, you're out of luck and have to figure it out manually.
Ok, I see what you're saying here, still, Linux's way is better, I'd rather have my system cluttered with useless files of deleted programs than be exploited because of something that was solved decades ago.
> Why do Windows programs need special installers/uninstallers?
This is supposed to happen using MSI-based installers. It's a windows component.
> Why isn't this handled by Windows itself?
Now, here's where things get tricky.
In the article, the issue is an explorer plugin. MSI is notoriously buggy with installing and uninstalling explorer plugins. If you don't jump through hoops, your installer will have a bug where it prompts the user to close Explorer.exe.
I know because I shipped a product with an explorer plugin. The installer was always a thorn in our side; and the workarounds, ect, that we had to do to install / uninstall / delete our plugin were more complicated than the plugin itself.
It's hardly specific to Windows. All the major Linux distros have excellent package management systems, and yet many, many packages and applications choose to ignore these in favour of party solutions, scripts, or even curl https://not-malware.trustme.lol | sudo bash style hodgepodge.
