RE: Missed an update.

[Dov Isaacs <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Richard,

As the person within Adobe who is best known INTERNALLY as the
"equal opportunity harasser of ALL Adobe product groups," let me
try to address your very insightful (maybe incite-ful as well)
comments!

There is no question that Adobe's (as well as virtually every other
software provider's) installers and uninstallers could stand quite
a bit of improvement. I'm usually the first person in-house to
really YELL about this!

(1) The "cancel out of FrameMaker installation" hackery associated
with installation of the bundled Distiller ended with FrameMaker 7,
thank goodness. "We" got our point across to the FrameMaker 7 team
(and surprisingly enough, also the PageMaker 7 team -- PageMaker
had the same problem) that the primary product installer should not
bunnystomp all over the user's system. The bundled Distiller 5.0.5
installer now must be run separately IF the user wants or needs to
run it.

(2) Having the Acrobat 4.x uninstaller recognize that Acrobat 5.x (or
later) is installed is not what I think the correct solution is here.
In fact, the Acrobat 5.x installer should not install the product until
ALL vestiges of Acrobat 4.x are automatically removed and it is "safe"
to install Acrobat 5.x, for example. (By safe, I mean that the conflicts
in drivers, what runs when double-clicked, registry entries, options,
Microsoft Office PDFMaker interfaces, browser interfaces, etc. are not
going to occur!) Same thing for other "combos" such as Acrobat 5.x and
Acrobat 6, etc.

(3) 20-20 hindsight is perfect; 20-20 foresight just does not realistically
exist. After the fact, it is very easy to say that the uninstaller for
product x, version n should recognize all the installation information
(in registry or otherwise) for version n+1 of the product, but that isn't
realistic. Rules for use of the registry, installers, file locations, etc.
plus other installer/uninstaller requirements as well as OS architecture 
changed DRAMATICALLY between Acrobat 4 and Acrobat 5 and subsequently 
between Acrobat 5 and Acrobat 6, for example. Best example of this is what
happened with ATM (Adobe Type Manager) 4.0. The ATM 4.0 installer does not
prevent the product from being installed under Windows 2000/XP/2003 because
at the time we developed ATM 4.0, we had no reason to believe that the Windows
OS architecture would change so much that installing ATM 4.0 would actually 
damage the system. Sorry, but Ms. Claire Voyant is not a member of our 
planning and development staffs.

(4) As indicated above, not all information about all programs' (and versions)
program and data components are stored in the registry in a consistent fashion
over all versions of the operating system and the applications.

(5) Many of the problems of this thread would have been avoided if the
Acrobat and/or Acrobat Distiller installers were designed not to allow
concurrent installation of differing versions and variants of the product.
At the alter of "allowing users utmost flexibility" (as well as the ability to
screw themselves), none of the Acrobat installers prevented installation of
a new version or variant without uninstalling a previous version or other
variant. I personally believe that this was the wrong decision as it leads to
bad results for the vast majority of users.

(6) One could conceivably re-architect both Acrobat as well as all other
Adobe (and everyone else's) applications to allow for concurrent installation
of multiple versions and variants with a "bless-this-version/bless-that-version"
control panel to do quick fix-ups and patches to quickly switch between versions
and variants. I have advocated this internally within Adobe, but there has been
no customer feedback through marketing or support to support my desire for such
a feature that would require significant planning and re-architecture of all
Adobe's product installers, uninstallers, and program initialization. 

Anyway, I think I am pretty much with you folks on this; but it is not as easy
as it may seem with 20-20 hindsight AND it comes at a high initial product
development and test cost. For what it is worth ...

        - Dov



At 8/13/2003 07:54 AM, Richard Combs wrote:
>Fred Ridder wrote: 
> 
>> One of the reasons why Dov always advises against having multiple
>> versions of Acrobat installed on the same system is that when you
>> uninstall an old version it is very likely to clobber the 
>> installation of
>> any newer versions because it deletes files that are common to all
>> versions (the uninstall has no way of knowing that there is a newer
>> program version that may be depending on some of the same files). 
>
>Good point, Fred, but I have to take issue with your parenthetical explanation. The uninstall routine can and should know exactly that!
>
>The primary advantage of the Windows Registry (offsetting several disadvantages) is that all programs' data about installation, configuration, dependencies, etc., is (or should be) readily available and kept up to date. 
>
>Why can't the uninstall routine for Acro 4 recognize that Acro 5 is installed (the information is right there in the Registry)? Heck, 3rd-party "cleanup" tools can determine whether a DLL is still needed by another program. 
>
>Why should I have to "cancel out of" an FM installation at just the right time to avoid clobbering my Acrobat installation? Why doesn't the installation program detect my Acrobat installation? 
>
>The archives of this list demonstrate that Adobe has a long history of brain-dead or defective installs and uninstalls, requiring us to go through lengthy manual procedures in just the right order to avoid problems. In my experience, they're about the worst major software company in this regard.  
>
>Richard


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