[wpkg-users] [Bug 114] new parameter /force2 ?

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http://bugzilla.wpkg.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114





--- Comment #7 from Jens Geile <jens.geile at mzbs.de>  2008-05-08 19:55:44 ---
The /checkUnassigned looks like exactly what I want. :) The only thing missing
would be my idea written below.

> The probability to detect exactly this version of the software is also
> decreasing its use. Of course quite general checks could be used to detect
> any version of Firefox for example checking for the firefox.exe binary.
> Unfortunately this decreases the stability of WPKG installation checks due to
> the fact that such a general check still returns true on systems where the
> user did a downgrade of the WPKG-deployed Firefox 2.0.0.14 to Firefox
> 2.0.0.13. WPKG could simply not detect it.
I thought about this too and I think I found a probably good solution to this
issue.
I've by now encountered a few software products that cannot be updated without
uninstalling a previous version or at least disabling a system service or any
of that stuff. Adding all those remove commands as install commands and thus
making the <install..> and <upgrade..> blocks almost the same cannot be the
solution we are aiming for.
<install..> is for installations and <upgrade..> is for upgrading!
On new installations all this really isn't much of a problem but I'm installing
WPKG also on already installed systems with all the software already installed.
The problem here is that the installed software is outdated and newer versions
have been released over the past couple of months.
Just to give you an impression of how many clients I'm talking about here: Over
2000 computers running Windows 2000 or XP.

Anyway, back to the solution I've thought of (lets take "Firefox 2.0.0.14" as
example again):
Usually we'd check if Firefox is installed with a line like this:
<check type="uninstall" condition="exists" path="Mozilla Firefox (2.0.0.14)" />

Why not simply define a second/third/forth/... line like this:
<check type="logical" condition="or" action="upgrade">
  <check type="uninstall" condition="exists" path="Mozilla Firefox (2.0.0.13)"
action="upgrade" />
  <check type="uninstall" condition="exists" path="Mozilla Firefox (2.0.0.12)"
action="upgrade" />
</check>

That way WPKG would think Firefox is installed when it finds "Mozilla Firefox
(2.0.0.14)" and do nothing. Only if that check returns "false" WPKG would use
the check conditions with 'action="upgrade"' and in this example if either of
them matches and returns true it would run the <upgrade..> commands.

I know you don't really like making the xml any more complex than it already is
but I really think this would be a really great feature to have to battle all
those nasty little programs that refuse to be installed over an already
installed version.


> So in such case I would personally prefer to create a 'firefox-remover'
> package with execute="always" and an install command which checks for Firefox
> and removes it as necessary.
While this would be of course possible I don't really even want to think about
creating a '*-remove' package for every package in my database.


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