No uninstall for OSX client

Bug #1119771 reported by Julien Funk
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Ubuntu One Client
Confirmed
High
Mike McCracken

Bug Description

There is no clean and/or simple way to uninstall U1 on the OSX client. Typically to uninstall an app the user just drags the .app to the Trash and the whole program is uninstalled properly - failing that, there should be a uninstall-ubuntuone.app in a U1 directory of the Application folder.

What happens now when the client is closed without using the filesync icon in the menu bar, then the icon remains on the menu bar even after the application is closed and it's .app file is moved to the trash. This shows a user that there is lingering configurations and perhaps large amounts of storage still being used by the app.

Mike McCracken (mikemc)
Changed in ubuntuone-client:
assignee: MikeC (mikec) → Mike McCracken (mikemc)
Revision history for this message
Mike McCracken (mikemc) wrote :

This is an interesting problem. I have a couple of comments:

1. most apps don't have uninstallers, and while it's true that the usual thing is to just drag the .app to the trash, all that does is delete the .app itself - there are always prefs files (in ~/Library/Preferences) and potentially cached stuff and "Application Support" files, none of which are ever cleaned up in most cases. This is a problem with how apps were distributed on OS X before the app store - there's no way to tell the system to clean up when you're going away.

We could make an uninstaller, but the amount of actual space those auxiliary files take up is small and probably not worth it.

2. HOWEVER - we might need to make it clearer what the menubar icon means - it means that the client (syncdaemon) is still running. So the only way to completely quit the client is to quit it from the menubar icon. Quitting control panel only quits control panel.
This is important because just as there's no uninstaller, there's also no installer, so when a user upgrades, we need them to really quit everything before dragging the old app to the trash and running the new one.

(Maybe the right thing to do here is to have a way to check the version of syncdaemon when you connect to it, so you can quit it if it's an old one that was still running after an upgrade. )

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