195818 - Uninstall in upgrade scenario

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Installer, enhancement)

Description

[Ray Trent]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530

I have seem numerous situations (e.g. bug 195600 comment 2) where a bug has been
deemed INVALID because the Mozilla installer "doesn't support upgrades". The
reporter is told to always uninstall before installing Mozilla.

If this is "official Mozilla policy" (such as it is :-), then I think we very
much need the following enhancment (almost to the point of my wanting to make it
a critical severity bug, instead :-):

On install, if a previous installation of Mozilla is installed, offer to
uninstall it before proceeding with the installation. If the Mozilla installer
isn't intended to support upgrades, and upgrades cause frequent problems, this
seems like a necessary (and easy) fix.

Another (perhaps superior?) approach would be to *always* uninstall before
installing. 

If, on the other hand, upgrade installations are "supposed" to work, some kind
of evangelization should be done to stop the frequent "INVALID" responses to
upgrade problems. Oh, and the bugs should be fixed :-). FWIW, most of the
problems I've run across seem related to XPCOM, but that's not directly relevant
to this request. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Jason Bassford]

Shockingly, I wasn't able to find a dupe for this.

I am confirming the bug, but adding "dupeme?" to the whiteboard since I can't
believe this is the first time anybody could have filed a bug on this.

Also setting dependencies.  (Theoretically, what currently happens during a
manual uninstall could be done automatically at present, but it would be nice to
address all remaining uninstall issues that could cause errors due to a lack of
a *really* clean uninstall.)

Note, however, that even if the installer DOES include an "uninstall previous
version" option, a bug could still be marked INVALID if the reporter did not
elect to choose that option.  The fact that Mozilla does not support upgraded
installs would still be a valid statement.  (Even if addressing this installer
deficiency were implemented.)

Comment 2

[Ray Trent]

Probably if this is implemented, there would need to be some kind of user option
for doing a "complete" uninstall (i.e. remove components as well) vs. the
typical uninstall. This would (at least somewhat gracefully) address the various
situations that have come up with upgrades and XPCOM (e.g. bug 195600). 

Comment 3

[Sean Su]

Simply uninstalling mozilla won't solve upgrade problems because the problems
are typically incompatibility issues with 3rd party apps/components which the
uninstaller does not know about.

bug 210731 and bug 198081 should take care of upgrade problems without the need
to uninstall first (even though it doesn't really help).

closing bug as wontfix cause bug 210731 and bug 198081 will take care of upgrade
problems.