Uninstall of 0.46 deletes Vista registry keys for 0.47 association with the SVG file type

[Will Pittenger]

I had the 0.47 beta and 0.46 installed on my Vista 64-bit machine. I uninstalled the beta and installed Chris Morgan's first post beta 0.47 build. Once I was satisfied that was working, I uninstalled 0.46. Now, only the 0.47 post-beta build is installed. Today I noticed that 0.47 wasn't associated with the SVG file type. I was able to fix the problem, but I figure that some other users might run into this problem.

When two versions are installed, both should be registered independently with Windows. That gives the user a choice of which version to open files with. Then when you uninstall one, the remaining version is still registered.

So this could be a bug in the installer, the uninstaller, or both.

[Will Pittenger (will-pittenger1)]

What would it take for Inkscape to detect and repair the registry registration?

[Chris Morgan (chris.morgan)]

This is not a bug. It's normal expected behaviour for just about any program. Very few things actively support multiple installations of different versions.

Putting these things in different channels (official release (e.g. 0.48), official development release (e.g. 0.48pre1), unofficial development build (e.g. 0.47+devel+12f7a8935bc8)) is the only solution to this, but it's just far too messy to do it at all. The only practical way I see of approaching this is moving file extension registration into the Inkscape core itself, and simplifying the installer as much as possible.

Too complex, impossible to do well. Especially because we've still got to maintain backwards compatibility with older releases of the installer.

At this time, I'm not going to try to implement this. I think that "Wishlist" is the best importance descriptor for this.