Uninstallation does not delete files extracted to package directory by chocolateyInstall.ps1

[jberezanski]

When a package is uninstalled, only files contained in the nupkg are removed from the package directory. If the package install script put extra files there (e.g. using the common pattern for zip packages - extract the downloaded zip to package directory), those files are left behind when the package is uninstalled and the package directory is not deleted.

In PS Choco, the package directory was unconditionally deleted.

Is the change intentional? If yes, will the auto uninstaller service eventually handle removing such files or will package maintainers have to explicitly code it in chocolateyUninstall.ps1?

[ferventcoder]

choco clean will handle additional cleanup.

[ferventcoder]

And there is choco uninstall --force

[ferventcoder]

If you want, we can call this a documentation issue?

[dhilgarth]

Would you encourage adding an uninstall script that removes those files via Uninstall-ChocolateyZipPackage? Or would you discourage it? Or don't you have a preference? Looking for best practices here.

[ferventcoder]

I think I misunderstood this issue when I first read it. I think we'll want to automatically look for those unzipped files (based on that file that is created) and remove them as part of uninstall.
And any downloaded files.

[dhilgarth]

Great, I totally agree! So, the manual call to Uninstall-ChocolateyZipPackage would be unnecessary?

[ferventcoder]

Yes

On Thursday, February 26, 2015, Daniel Hilgarth [email protected]
wrote:

Great, I totally agree! So, the manual call to
Uninstall-ChocolateyZipPackage would be unnecessary?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#121 (comment).

Rob
"Be passionate in all you do"

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[rismoney]

love it.

[jberezanski]

Great! I was concerned about the increased workload for maintainers of zip-based packages and the need to modify all such existing packages to retain current uninstall behavior. Besides, it seemed contrary to the goal of eliminating the need for chocolateyUninstall.ps1 in common cases.

[ferventcoder]

@jberezanski Yeah sorry I misunderstood what you were talking about before...

[bc3tech]

I have a pull request prepped that improves Uninstall-ChocolateyZipPackage to work more robustly. I found in the case of one package that uses ZIP install, the call to Uninstall-ChocolateyZipPackage would hang on specifiers in the .zip.txt file that were directory names and not files. My improvement solves this and successfully deletes all files denoted in the .zip.txt file contained in the package's lib directory.

@ferventcoder: You want I should submit the pull request?

[ferventcoder]

@bc3tech Yeah we can improve uninstall-chocolateyzippackage for now.

[bc3tech]

@ferventcoder pull request submitted. Thanks! hopefully it's not too crazy.

[AnthonyMastrean]

To be clear, the Uninstall-ChocolateyZipPackage helper doesn't work at all, as-is. It hangs waiting for confirmation (I recreated the relevant chunk in my shell)...

PS> $zipContentFile = 'C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\tinycc\tinyccInstall.zip.txt'
PS> $zipContents=get-content $zipContentFile
>>> foreach ($fileInZip in $zipContents) {
>>>   remove-item "$fileInZip" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
>>> }

Confirm
The item at C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\tinycc\tools\tcc has children and the Recurse parameter was not
specified. If you continue, all children will be removed with the item. Are you sure you want to continue?
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [S] Suspend  [?] Help (default is "Y"):

You need, at least, the -Force and -Recurse flags to ignore all prompts.

Then you should consider that the zip contents text file starts with the top-most directory.

C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\tinycc\tools\tcc
C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\tinycc\tools\tcc\libtcc
C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\tinycc\tools\tcc\libtcc.dll
C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\tinycc\tools\tcc\tcc.exe
C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\tinycc\tools\tcc\tiny_impdef.exe
C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\tinycc\tools\tcc\tiny_libmaker.exe

The Remove-Item loop will recursively delete the top-level folder, and fail to delete all the children. For example, without the Error Action specified...

Remove-Item : Cannot find path 'C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\tinycc\tools\tcc\libtcc.dll' because it does not exist.
At line:1 char:65
+ Get-Content C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\tinycc\tinyccInstall.zip.txt | Remove-Item -For ...
+                                                                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (C:\ProgramData\...libtcc\libtcc.dll:String) [Remove-Item], ItemNotFoundException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : PathNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.RemoveItemCommand

The -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue parameter will suppress that error. Or, you could add a Test-Path into the pipeline. I'd rewrite that whole loop in one of two ways

Get-Content $zipContentFile | ?{ Test-Path $_ } | Remove-Item -Force -Recurse

Or you might still want to silently continue past all other possible errors (which are?)

Get-Content $zipContentFile | Remove-Item -Force -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

In either case, what is the recommendation for package authors until this bug is fixed? Do we allow the zip files and, for packages that unzip into the install directory, the sparsely deleted package directory to stick around?

[ferventcoder]

So the fixes from @bc3tech went into 0.9.9.5. So there is that path forward for now.

[ferventcoder]

This remains open as the ultimate fix here is to capture what is in the folder at install and clean it up if it hasn't changed.

[AnthonyMastrean]

Awesome :)

In the past, I leaned heavily on Chocolatey removing the entire install directory, especially for locally extracted zip packages.

[ferventcoder]

This is fixed in 3bb8421