331–340 of 556 posts
The guys at MS are smart enough to decompile assembly but still not enough to have a proper inode-based filesystem where you can delete files that are in use.
Allowing you to have inconsistently valid data, where a file can both exist and not exist depending on who's asking, is the opposite of smart.
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I see no reason not to allow this. That's why people at Microsoft made those decision and not you. The most obvious reason would be to use the executable itself to back the memory which the comment you replied to already hinted at. Instead of loading the entire executable into memory on application start, you just create some memory mapping entry. As the code executes and accesses different parts of the executable, t…
I have very little respect to people at Microsoft when it comes to technical side of things. Whenever I have to deal with their "creations" it's like they were motivated by malice, or part of their frontal cortex gone missing. > The most obvious reason would be to use the executable itself to back the memory which the comment you replied to already hinted at. Imagine that I've already read that, and I still see no re…
Why do Windows programs need special installers/uninstallers? Why isn't this handled by Windows itself?
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There was a bug in some Linux driver installer that accidentally /usr, the whole thing.
EVE online's patcher once deleted boot.ini (a file configuring their launcher that they stopped needing) without checking the working directory which caused it to delete C:\Windows\system32\boot.ini which was important to booting the then current Windows version.
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I see no reason not to allow this. That's why people at Microsoft made those decision and not you. The most obvious reason would be to use the executable itself to back the memory which the comment you replied to already hinted at. Instead of loading the entire executable into memory on application start, you just create some memory mapping entry. As the code executes and accesses different parts of the executable, t…
If an open file is deleted, it's no longer enumerable in the file system. But its pages / blocks / whatever are still there on the disk, marked as used, and can back the page cache.
Once the file is closed, the filesystem notices that the blocks do not belong to a file accessible from outside, and garbage-collects the data blocks. It all closely resembles reference-counted GC.
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I see no reason not to allow this. That's why people at Microsoft made those decision and not you. The most obvious reason would be to use the executable itself to back the memory which the comment you replied to already hinted at. Instead of loading the entire executable into memory on application start, you just create some memory mapping entry. As the code executes and accesses different parts of the executable, t…
As the original comment mention, this issues doesn't exist on Linux because the FS is inode based. The file content will be removed only when the last user has been removed.
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It has little to do with the filesystem. Windows has OS level locks. In the case of a running executable, the mapped memory holds a lock on the exe file to prevent deleting it. This is intentional. If it didn't hold the lock then it would be possible to delete the exe file on modern versions of Windows. Edit: since there still seems to be confusion I'll try to be clearer. On NTFS you can delete an open file. This is…
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The name calling and lack of actual examples shows that you probably haven’t even thought about potential downsides. I haven’t either, but it’s because I don’t really care about this particular issue. I just care enough to point out that the “mentally-challenged foot soldiers” at Microsoft may have actually run into some exploits or malicious behavior because they did “allow useful things” at one point.
[0]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050607-00/?p=35...
How do I uninstall Windows?
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Migrating_From_Microsoft_Wind...
So not quite what I'm looking for :D
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The same way any linux distro does? 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 applicat…
>The same way any linux distro does? >Define a separate directory for program installations, that user processes cannot write to. What about /usr/local/bin? Isn't that specifically for putting non package manager binaries into?