[Installer] Why the MSI is copied on two folders ?

[mooms]

Hi,

 

Paint.net setup is copying the (uncompressed) msi in 

C:\Windows\Installer\

and

C:\Program Files\paint.net\

 

The msi is relatively big, 208 MB, so maybe this could be avoided ?

Also, maybe it could be  the compressed version,  more than three times smaller, that is stored ?

 

 

 

Keeping a complete copy of the installer permanently cached is questionable in itself, logically the user/administrator already keeps a copy if needed, but if on top of that this cached copy is duplicated...

 

Thank you.

Edited October 4, 2023 by mooms

[Rick Brewster]

Paint.NET only makes the copy in Program Files\paint.net\Staging.

 

It does this because it was proven to drastically reduce the number of uninstall/update failures. For some reason the other copy, which Windows itself is supposed to maintain, would get deleted. No idea why. And then the user would be left in a completely broken state, unable to uninstall, update, or reinstall.

 

It does get tagged for NTFS compression, which saves about 33%. It's not very large either way on a modern system.

[BDP]

Didn't realise this. I also have two copies of the installer, from the latest update:

 

Brian

 

[mooms]

On 10/4/2023 at 5:45 PM, Rick Brewster said:

Paint.NET only makes the copy in Program Files\paint.net\Staging.

 

It does this because it was proven to drastically reduce the number of uninstall/update failures. For some reason the other copy, which Windows itself is supposed to maintain, would get deleted. No idea why. And then the user would be left in a completely broken state, unable to uninstall, update, or reinstall.

 

It does get tagged for NTFS compression, which saves about 33%. It's not very large either way on a modern system.

 

I see. In other setup engine, that would be resolved by running the original setup again, pretty straightforward and logical to me.

So maybe the installer could automatically delete the one in C:\Windows\Installer\ then ?

Also, why aren't you using the downloaded installer ? 208MB versus 62 MB, that's way more saving than using NTFS compression.

The problem is, every MSI setup is copying its installer in C:\Windows\Installer\, so the folder can easily take several GB of (wasted) space after some times. 208 MB is huge, in fact, it's the second biggest one on that folder on my laptop.

[Rick Brewster]

56 minutes ago, mooms said:

So maybe the installer could automatically delete the one in C:\Windows\Installer\ then ?

That sounds like a recipe for total disaster.

 

I'm not going to be changing anything here -- the current state of things is the result of almost 20 years of development, testing, and reactive fixes to how things work in the real world. It works. That's what's important. Any changes legitimately risk causing chaos across millions of PCs.

 

If the disk space is that important to you then you can use command-line tools to establish symlinks between the identical files. I don't promise that will actually work though.