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Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one

Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one

michelangelo

Comments (50)

  • chihuahua
    It must have been difficult and frustrating to work as part of the Windows team back in those days.You see all the wacky software that doesn't follow the rules properly, does whatever it wants, breaks things. And you have to figure out how Windows can accommodate all that software, keep it from breaking, and also prevent it from messing up a computer or undo the damage.They did not have the option of saying "this app developer wrote shitty software, sucks to be them, not my problem."I wonder how much of this problem was caused by lack of adequate documentation describing how an installer should behave, and how much was developers not reading that documentation and being content when it works on their machine.
  • akdev1l
    >Windows 95 worked around this by keeping a backup copy of commonly-overwritten files in a hidden C:\Windows\SYSBCKUP directory. Whenever an installer finished, Windows went and checked whether any of these commonly-overwritten files had indeed been overwritten.This is truly unhinged. I wonder if running an installer under wine in win95 mode will do this.
  • Lammy
    > Whenever an installer finished, Windows went and checked whether any of these commonly-overwritten files had indeed been overwritten.> Basically, Windows 95 waited for each installer to finishHow could it tell that a particular process was an installer? Just anything that writes to the PROGRA~1 or WINDOWS folders?
  • ruevs
    And 6-7 years later the `WinSxS` directory was born and these days it is tens of gigabytes.`Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase`In an administrator command prompt. You can thank me when it's finished ;-)
  • forkerenok
    OMG, is this the reason why every other installer would get stuck at 99% forever? :D
  • iamcalledrob
    I love the naiveté of this approach.Unlike <arbitrary heuristic>, it's so easy to reason about. I wish this kind of approach was still viable.
  • 1970-01-01
    The sad lesson is to be both proactive and reactive if you want a clean environment. Trust, verify, and stick around to clean up someone else's mess after the fact.
  • phendrenad2
    Windows, especially old versions, were beautifully pragmatic. Think about the things that would need to exist on an open-source OS to match this functionality. You'd need to:1. Convince people to distribute programs via installers.2. Provide some way that installers can tell the OS that they're an installer (and not invent 5 different ways to do this!)3. Convince the creators of installers to actually use that function.4. Convince library creators to maintain backward compatibility (big ask).5. Convince people to not fork said libraries, creating ambiguous upgrade paths.6. If there are multiple distros, convince them all to use the same backup/restore format for libraries (and not treat their own favorite libraries as "special")