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Re: Proprietary Slopware can't uninstall itself properly

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____/ Homer on Sunday 10 August 2008 15:46 : \____

> One expects this kind if brain-dead behaviour on Windows, since we've
> all known from day one that Windows completely lacks any proper package
> management, and sloppy uninstalls are endemic on that platform,
> typically leaving behind a slew of garbage in that abomination called
> the Registry, and in seemingly random and arbitrary locations all over
> the filesystem. Indeed it actually seems impossible to uninstall certain
> components at /all/ under Windows, third-party or otherwise. I've
> previously mentioned Nero Scout, and certain versions of Windows Media
> Player; DirectX and Internet Explorer, for example.
> 
> But here we have a Linux application packaged in RPM format, that cannot
> uninstall itself properly, leaving behind (just like Windows) a slew of
> crap all over the filesystem, and worse yet, failing to leave the system
> in the same state in which it found it (again, just like Windows),
> actually damaging system and user configurations to the point that the
> system becomes unusable, until extensive diagnosis and manual correction
> has been performed.
> 
> This is where the argument that "proprietary = professional = better"
> completely falls flat, since there is absolutely nothing "professional"
> about the utter garbage that I've just spent the last few hours battling
> with.
> 
> I'm referring to Adobe Reader for Linux version 8.1.2, which is provided
> as proprietary freeware in an RPM package.
> 
> I recently decided to compare features and PDF rendering on three PDF
> viewers, Adobe Reader; Evince and KPDF. As it turns out, all three are
> pretty comparable, other than the fact that Adobe Reader is somewhat
> slow; bloated; and (as I later discovered) has a badly broken uninstall
> RPM script. Adobe Reader also seems to have a problem with certain
> embedded images for some reason, as printing those affected documents
> from Adobe Reader produces solid black boxes instead of the embedded
> image. It renders the image OK to the screen though. I have no idea what
> the problem is, and as it's a proprietary application it's unlikely that
> I ever will. There has also been quite a few security and privacy
> concerns over using Adobe's proprietary software, again something that
> users are powerless to do anything about, beyond vetoing that kind of
> software.
> 
> It's when it comes to uninstalling Adobe Reader that the "fun" really
> starts though. The first clue that something went wrong was when the
> "rpm -e" command took an inordinate amount of time to complete,
> certainly longer than I expected. As I later discovered, this was due to
> the "%post" scripts that formed part of the package, which are executed
> "post" uninstall, ostensibly to restore the system configuration to its
> previous state. What these scripts /actually/ did was completely wipe
> out the system MIME settings for PDF, requiring me to manually restore
> them using RPM and KDE Control Centre:
> 
> http://forum.fedoraforum.org/printthread.php?t=181598
> 
> I then discovered that Firefox was unable to handle PDF files correctly
> too, since the Adobe RPM had failed to clean up garbage it left behind
> in the plugins directory (nppdf.so). Even then, I still had to force the
> plugin cache to refresh, by deleting ~/.mozilla/firefox/pluginreg.dat
> before I could finally download PDF files again using Firefox.
> 
> What a bloody mess, and all thanks to Adobe's non-standard and broken
> RPM of their proprietary Slopware.
> 
> Is anyone still confused about why I advocate keeping the Windows
> paradigm as far away from Linux as possible? As IBM's Bob Sutor recently
> said; "Stop copying Windows". This mess from Adobe is just one of the
> many reason why. The "Windows way" of doing things is not only broken,
> but is /mysteriously/ broken in ways that cannot be addressed by the
> user - beyond trial and error, and even then the best one can hope for
> is a workaround rather than an actual solution. That makes it not only
> broken, but actually dangerous.

They try to simplify this to the point of ignoring package managers and using
the same practices that GPU makers, Automatix and companies like Sony do to
ruin one's system. Google Earth, I suspect, is a similar bugger that assume a
one-click intall trumps all (I last installed it about 2 years ago, so it may
have changed).

I installed Adobe Reader just 2 days ago. I needed it to export as text an ISO
document that was leaked to me and KPDF cannot do selection as far as I can
tell (and yes... I could have gone with Evince which is on my repo but I
didn't and I even SSH's to another faculty in order to just use proprietary
junk without installing it on my system). Anyway, my experience so far on
Mandriva has been good. I have not tried /un/intalling the software, but I did
download it at very high speed (just a few seconds) from Adobe, double-clicked
it (put the password in) and voila! It was installed. Even file associations
were in tact and there was no need to restart the session. There was quite a
big EULA to click OK on, though.

Hiding complexity to simplify may also mean hiding a lot of mess. Not "mess" as
in complexity but "mess" as in "your system is being messed up". No wonder
Windows is wiped and reinstalled so often. No wonder so little software is
compatible with Windows Vista. Ugly hacks cannot be carried through.

- -- 
                ~~ Best of wishes

Roy S. Schestowitz      |    "Turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie"
http://Schestowitz.com  |    RHAT Linux     |     PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
 18:05:02 up 20 days,  4:11,  3 users,  load average: 1.02, 0.98, 0.83
      http://iuron.com - Open Source knowledge engine project
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