Initial Install event is not sent until AFTER attempt to delete RootAppDirectory

[bwardipcommerce]

No way to avoid "Failed to remove existing directory on full install, is the app still running???" message.

If the event happened earlier, it could take care of everything BEFORE giving the installing user that message.

Alternatively, a command line switch to avoid this deletion behaviour would be helpful.

Reference commit:
1819ec7

[anaisbetts]

This is by design, we remove any old installs before reinstalling

[bwardipcommerce]

I understand, but we use Squirrel to install program running minimized in the system tray.

Unfortunately, sometimes they run the Setup program twice. This happens very frequently.

Surely there should be a way to avoid an ugly message when that happens. Such as an Event that everything will be deleted – before deletion starts.

From: Paul Betts [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, November 19, 2015 1:15 PM
To: Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows [email protected]
Cc: Brian Ward [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Squirrel.Windows] Initial Install event is not sent until AFTER attempt to delete RootAppDirectory (#498)

This is by design, we remove any old installs before reinstalling

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/498#issuecomment-158184426.

[anaisbetts]

The problem is that usually the reason why people are reinstalling is that their existing installation is corrupted or not working, so we have a pretty low likelihood that Squirrel hooks will actually run / do anything useful.

I understand that this is an issue though, we'll mull over doing what we do on uninstall, force killing any process that is in our directory

[willdean]

Could Squirrel set system-wide named event before starting the uninstall - then the running app could wait for this event and kill itself if it saw it?

[Nawv]

We're running into the same issue here, where the user is accidentally trying to install the app twice. The major issue is Squirrel tries deleting the destination directory before it realises that some files are locked, leaving the installation in a broken state.

It looks like Discord attempted to fix this in their fork, by checking if Squirrel can rename the directory before trying to delete, and rolling back if not. Is there any possibility we could do something similar?

Possibly related to #1717.

[whyleyc]

@anaisbetts @robmen We are hitting this issue daily with our end users, and are keen to resolve. It looks like the fix suggested by @Nawv would do the job nicely. Are you accepting community-contributed PR's for this repository?