Serendipity Forums

Hi

Please add a real uninstall possibility for plugins.

This should delete the plugin and all related data on disk and in the database, including any tables.

In my opinion this would go to the core features.

Cheers

Dirk

I took the liberty of editing the topic to fit our versioning scheme for this subforum.

I second this, but it could be difficult to implement because of the (possible) mixture of plugins added manually and via spartacus. Also, permissions set by the spartacus plugin might be an issue here, especially given the fact that those can be configured in the plugin. Might be complicated to implement for various hosting situations, too.

Another thought: Have we ever thought about adding the spartacus plugin to the core? And yes, by that I mean making it possible to install plugins only through spartacus. From my point of view, anyone using S9y most definitely wants to use spartacus. I might not notice possible issues here, but is there a good reason for not using it? Is there a good reason for not making it the default and only way to add, remove and update plugins?

YL

Hi!

On my blog I have a CVS checkout of the additional_plugins module and symlink it into my plugins/ directory. I would never want to use spartacus...

Uninstalling indeed is a bit problematic because in more cases than not it will have write issues. Personally, I also like that uninstalling plugins does not completely remove it. The few bytes it saves is often not worth having to re-download a plugin if I want to enable it again. Also, if you made any custom changes to a plugin or .tpl file, you'd lose them forever...I don't really feel comfortable with this.

Regards,
Garvin

yellowled wrote:I took the liberty of editing the topic to fit our versioning scheme for this subforum.

I second this, but it could be difficult to implement because of the (possible) mixture of plugins added manually and via spartacus. Also, permissions set by the spartacus plugin might be an issue here, especially given the fact that those can be configured in the plugin. Might be complicated to implement for various hosting situations, too.

Difficult does not mean impossible. And in this case we only have two possibilities to think of. Self-upload or Spartacus.

Even if it is not possible to delete the files, there could be an output or maybe even a document, where you can find all the files, configurations and tables for manual deletion.

I can imagine a mask showing these points:
delete files (plugins/serendipity_event_bla) yes/no
delete tables (prefix_bla1, prefix_bla2, ...) yes/no
delete configuration items (dataset id x in table y, ...) yes/no

yellowled wrote:Another thought: Have we ever thought about adding the spartacus plugin to the core? And yes, by that I mean making it possible to install plugins only through spartacus. From my point of view, anyone using S9y most definitely wants to use spartacus. I might not notice possible issues here, but is there a good reason for not using it? Is there a good reason for not making it the default and only way to add, remove and update plugins?

I used serendipity in a company network where the server was not allowed to connect to the internet.

But I agree for internet sites.

garvinhicking wrote:In my blog I have a CVS checkout of the additional_plugins module and symlink it into my plugins/ directory. I would never want to use spartacus...

Uninstalling indeed is a bit problematic because in more cases than not it will have write issues. Personally, I also like that uninstalling plugins does not completely remove it. The few bytes it saves is often not worth having to re-download a plugin if I want to enable it again. Also, if you made any custom changes to a plugin or .tpl file, you'd lose them forever...I don't really feel comfortable with this.

You are a developper and have different needs than other people.

Cheers

Dirk

garvinhicking wrote:On my blog I have a CVS checkout of the additional_plugins module and symlink it into my plugins/ directory. I would never want to use spartacus...

What is your logic to this Garvin? And why would no never want to use spartacus?

good question, don!!! Is it unsecure, Garvin ????

Don Chambers wrote:

garvinhicking wrote:On my blog I have a CVS checkout of the additional_plugins module and symlink it into my plugins/ directory. I would never want to use spartacus...

What is your logic to this Garvin? And why would no never want to use spartacus?

Hi!

It's much easier to upgrade all plugins at once, I never have integrity issues, I never need to resort on mirrors and my local modifications will never get overwritten.

And of course, this is only for developers - I just wanted to object to yellowled to make spartacus mandatory.

As for the uninstall routine: If it would only report which files to delete when it's not possible, that of course can be achieved. An uninstall routine will also never be able to tell which database tables were created by a plugin; each plugin has to be changed for that, so full support for removal will always depend on the plugin maintainers or someones helpfulness to add the missing information to all plugins.

I'll try to work on that to get this thing started a bit in the next weeks

regards,
Garvin

Thanks for the explanation! When you said it was for your personal blog, I was not thinking in terms of development.

Don Chambers wrote:Thanks for the explanation! When you said it was for your personal blog, I was not thinking in terms of development.

Yeah, no - I was also speaking of my blog on garv.in - this is completely powered on SVN and CVS, this is where I enjoy not using Spartacus.

Really, Spartacus is a great tool for many users - I only wanted to say that there are valid reasons for people not to want to use it

Regards,
Garvin

garvinhicking wrote:On my blog I have a CVS checkout of the additional_plugins module and symlink it into my plugins/ directory. I would never want to use spartacus...

Yeah, this setup sounds familiar. I'm doing the same thing on my test server, but I know what I'm doing. (Well, more or less. )

However, this is not true for the vast majority of our users! The average John Doe user doesn't even know what CVS is, much less how to use it properly. I tend to encourage people, especially novice users, to use spartacus and use it from day 1, since it makes maintaining plugins so much easier. These are people who in most cases don't even like to use an FTP client or ssh. They like easy interfaces, and I think if it is at all possible to implement them in a sensible way, we should think about giving them the possibility to use easy interfaces ...

YL