coapp-developers team mailing list archive

[Garrett Serack <garretts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Magic.

I spent an awful lot of time digging into this--it was one of my strongest concerns with using WinSXS.

So yes, the scavenging process doesn't have a manual mechanism. But that's ok.

This is a really long explanation, and I'm crunched for time this week really bad, so I'm going to be mean, and tell you that (a) yes I know about it, (b) I've devised a solution for the problem, (c) I've spoken with the developer who maintains WinSXS and he's certified that I'm not insane and (d) I don't have time to go into detail right now. 

However, once I've gotten past a few dozen other things, we'll come back and I'll have this really long conversation.

In the end tho' it won't be a problem.

Garrett Serack | Open Source Software Developer | Microsoft Corporation 
I don't make the software you use; I make the software you use better on Windows.


-----Original Message-----
From: Nico Rieck [mailto:nico.rieck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 6:54 AM
To: Garrett Serack
Cc: coapp-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Coapp-developers] Let's talk about libraries

On 12.04.2010 19:49, Garrett Serack wrote:
> WinSXS (Windows Side-by-side) technology allows us to install multiple 
> versions of libraries, each tagged with a version
> (Major.Minor.Revision.Build) , and allows us to build 'policy' files 
> that direct programs to use the correct version.  We use manifests 
> with the applications to tell it what version (Major.Minor) it 
> requires, and the policy files direct the EXE to the best match (most 
> of the time, the most recent version in a given Major.Minor set.

When I experimented with WinSXS a while back (which coindicentally was for a similar project to CoApp) I found uninstalling a major pain.
Uninstalling the MSI didn't remove the files put into WinSXS, apparently due to safety precautions. Some sources say that there is some kind of scavenging process supposed to cleanup over time but no way start this manually (if it even exists). And since information about WinSXS' structure is pretty much non-existant removing those files was quite an ordeal.

How will CoApp deal with this?