Old apps get sent to trash?

[mdhari]

My users are noticing that every time they update the app, the previous version gets sent to the trash. Is this a recovery mechanism by design? The trash is growing daily everyday, which is not something I would want since it's going to eat their hard disks too easily. I just want to remove it completely.

[mdhari]

Changed the line in SUPlainInstaller.m from:

if (![constrainedFileManager moveItemAtURLToTrash:oldTempURL error:&trashError]) {

to

if (![constrainedFileManager removeItemAtURL:oldTempURL error:&trashError]) {

Deletes the old app now instead of moving to trash. Thanks.

[zorgiepoo]

Yes, old apps are moved to the trash by design. However this design is actually questionable and I could see a few issues:

• Makes the update process not very seamless if we leave an old installation visible in the trash. Or in your case the app uses up disk space for users that won't empty it. I don't think other software updaters (App Store, web browsers) do this, though correct me if I'm wrong.
• Moving an item to the trash could be an involved operation, doing more work and taking more time than necessary, and could even sometimes fail.
• Apple's new file system will be able to do atomic save safe directory/bundle replacements, but as far as I know, only if the old bundle is removed (this means you can't end up in a state where both the new app is not installed and the old app is missing). Although copies/clones in the new system can also be cheap, allowing to back up the old bundle before replacing it efficiently..

But the upside is the user can refer back to the old app if something went wrong with the updated one.

Could you please re-open this issue, and in the future not close a bug report if it still affects Sparkle? Thanks.

[mdhari]

Sure bud.

[schriftgestalt]

I just updated my sparkle-branch and saw that change by accident.

I don’t see that problems with the new file system. A move operation should be instantaneous as it only need to change the directory entry?

I really need the fallback that users can get the previous version back from the trash if there is a problem with the new version (mostly for beta versions).

[kornelski]

For beta versions that does seem like a useful safety net indeed.

However, from my maintainer's perspective that still a no. I'ved used Trash in ImageOptim app and had to add a bunch of workarounds and fallbacks for it, and I still get reports about files that fail to delete, network driveas without trash support, Dropbox getting confused by replacing trashed files too quickly, etc.