Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Win32 NSIS: calling old Ethereal uninstaller (if existing) before installing new

[Peter Johansson <Peter.Johansson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ulf Lamping wrote:

> Hi List!
>
> As other (Win32) installers will call an existing uninstallation 
> program before installing themselves, I'm asking myself if this should 
> be done by the Ethereal installer too.
>
> This is used to uninstall things that are no longer handled by the 
> current installer, making the installer much more "history 
> independent" than today.
>
> For example: if a former Ethereal installer would have uninstalled a 
> file named dontneedme.txt, and the later installer simply overwrites 
> things, it won't even install that file (and so it won't uninstall it 
> either later), this file would be kept until doomsday.
>
> Any thoughts about this?

It is always nice when an installation program cleans up any old *mess* 
before installing a new version. I would vote for this if it at the same 
time would be possible to have altered user preferences and colorisation 
rules survive to the new installation. I guess this means updating the 
installer to record the user configured information before uninstalling 
the previous version to be applied once the new version has been installed.
Although I see some difficulties with this. Should the installer be 
aware of version specific information? What I mean is that if the 0.10.x 
installation contains a file that should be transferred when installing 
0.11.x but not transferred when installing 0.12.x then specific 
information on how to handle different version transitions is required 
in the installation package.

Regards, Peter