Imagine knowing where each file in the system comes from.
Imagine having a package system, instead of that crap.
Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
31–40 of 556 posts
Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
#32I had never heard of detours before, but I guess it isn’t any different that a good old fashioned LD_PRELOAD
it's a little more general, I think, since one common use case for it is to use it on your own process in order to intercept calls to stdlib/OS code from libraries you don't control. For example, in the bad old days I used detours to virtualize the windows registry so that I could do "fake installs" of COM components inside of a VB6 app, allowing it to run without an install and without administrator permissions. Thi…
For those of us who don't Windows, can you explain what a detour is?
Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
#33Installing / uninstalling / updating software should be a service provided by the OS. Letting vendors do it themselves just gives them an opportunity to mess it up, and they frequently do.
Windows provides various installer systems (.msi and the later iterations for UWP applications). It's unfortunate that MSI files aren't used more often, because they're more reliable than their uninstall.exe counterparts. They're not unlike .deb/.rpm files, except they integrate with the system GUI better when it comes to prompts and variables.
I believe MSI files were originally supposed to be almost atomic in use (software is either installed or uninstalled), providing transactional operations for installing software and limited UI options. I remember (but can't find) an old quote from someone on the team that designed the file format, basically saying something among the lines of "giving developers the option to execute random commands from MSI installers was the worst decision we've made".
Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
#34Installing / uninstalling / updating software should be a service provided by the OS. Letting vendors do it themselves just gives them an opportunity to mess it up, and they frequently do.
I can't speak for whether Apple gets it right, but my experiences with the various package managers on Linux have not been any better than my experiences with installers on Windows. I've settled for avoiding system packages for anything I can build from source since system packages are always outdated and often Strange, and I try to avoid third party package sources and weird stuff like Snap or Flatpak since it's als…
I think part of it is that Debian and Ubuntu try to ship a good, usable default config, which is not necessarily the upstream default. I think it makes it hard to debug config issues.
Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
#35You can't rely on JScript being present unfortunately. It can be disabled.
Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
#36It's still entirely ridiculous that Windows doesn't allow you to delete open files.
Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
#37Installing / uninstalling / updating software should be a service provided by the OS. Letting vendors do it themselves just gives them an opportunity to mess it up, and they frequently do.
I can't speak for whether Apple gets it right, but my experiences with the various package managers on Linux have not been any better than my experiences with installers on Windows. I've settled for avoiding system packages for anything I can build from source since system packages are always outdated and often Strange, and I try to avoid third party package sources and weird stuff like Snap or Flatpak since it's als…
I don't quite get this, I've been using Debian-esque Linux since like 1997 in various forms and have had problems with apt-get/apt maybe five times since then in total and it's always fixable with a little work. I've seen this a lot and I've haven't really understood the problems.
I saw Linus from LTT brick his installation (in Pop_OS! I think?) but that was a clear user error.
Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
#38I love the reference to the Arthur C Clark quote
(It's weird that this comment was upvoted twice, now down voted twice)
This is the quote I'm referring to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
It's the third of his 3 laws
Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
#39Why is the recommended javascript way of doing it
var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var fs = require('fs') // (or the appropriate ES6 incantation)
?Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
#40Why is the recommended javascript way of doing it var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject"); rather than var fs = require('fs') // (or the appropriate ES6 incantation) ?
[deleted]