On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 2:24 AM Tim via users <users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 2022-07-11 at 14:33 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> I always wondered about that "reinstall the software" thing.
>
> I mean, how much should I trust software from someone who
> apparently is unable to just copy the software onto the disk?
>
> And even worse, it actually works sometimes.
I use a very large and complex app with a Java GUI and heavy lifting
done by open source libraries for a huge range of file formats, GDAL,
and various numerical libraries. There are silent background downloads
of "ancillary" files. Reinstalling is often needed when it breaks -- probably due to a corrupt file. There are
versions for Linux, macOS, and Windows, but I don't see any difference
across platforms so pretty sure there are glitches writing configuration
files.
I'd come to a few conclusions regarding that:
Silent disk errors. Things disappeared without notice while writing,
and/or later on. And checkdisk was fond of just deleting files it
considered faulty.
Mangling of files read from disk. When you open a file, a file system
can record when the file was last accessed. So what happens when it
pokes the data on a file and has a crash? Can it destroy the file?
(We're talking self-destructive MS file systems, here.) Why else
should some .dll file disappear that *you* never had interaction with.
Race conditions. Some programming flaw got in the way of some write
during installation, that didn't happen during the re-installation.
Although that doesn't take into account things that worked, later
failed, then got fixed by a reinstall.
I've seen many cases where users had started some GUI app from the
shell then done <Ctrl-Z> in case they might want to come back to it, but
end up leaving it suspended for days. Then they try to install an update
and the problems begin.
--
George N. White III
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