Install should warn before installing package without chocolateyUninstall.ps1

[asgeirn]

It seems a fair share of packages do not have uninstallation definitions at all, and I'm left with the task of figuring out what choco and the package has done to my system.

This feels very much like the horrors of the Windows 95 era where installers left cruft everywhere.

As a minimum, choco should post a warning and asking for confirmation before accepting to install a package with no automatic uninstallation.

[ferventcoder]

Chocolatey is in beta, and by v1 it won't need to have an uninstall script except for areas where folks want/need to do extra work.

For the most part, most packages don't do more than the native installer does, so simply going to programs and features and removing the software removes it from the machine, one just needs to also remember to remove the package files.

[ferventcoder]

Would you rather work be put into this or into making it unnecessary?

[asgeirn]

I agree with you that it's mainly the responsibility of upstream packages to do removal, but this leaves Chocolatey with a decision to make wrt packages that are less well behaved.

Arguably my sample set might not have been representative -- I tried Atom, cwrsync, mingw, and cygwin. None of these were MSI based, and none of them registered with Programs and Features, or sported any uninstallation commands.

[ferventcoder]

Ah, but if they don't do anything outside of chocolatey install boundaries, choco uninstall cleans it right up. This is the case of atom (except maybe the desktop shortcut).

[ferventcoder]

MinGW and CygWin I can see needing something to help cleanup, but I am not familiar with cwrsync.

[asgeirn]

And I suppose it's always going to be like this -- some packages are well kept in this regard, others leave something wanted.

But I would very much like Chocolatey to try to improve this where it can.

[ferventcoder]

Agreed. This will get better. My hope has always been to be able to inspect the chocolatey install and see what was done and do the opposite in some respects.