Oolite Bulletins

When I uninstalled v174.2, it deleted everything I had saved in the "root" of C:\Oolite folder. It kept the added subfolders, but not the files in C:\Oolite. And since they didn't go to the recycle bin, I tried an undelete program on them...most of them were quickly corrupted, due to Firefox's web cache filling up with temporary files which overwrote my Oolite-related files.

It's fortunate I have most of this stuff saved elsewhere, but it's still a bit of a loss.

We normally don't expect people to be putting files in the Oolite root folder, but seeing that modding and tweaking is an integral part of the game experience, chances are that they will. I think this is the second time that the issue is reported (Thargoid was the first to report it, if I am not mistaken) and in both cases it was files in the root folder that were lost as a result of the uninstaller doing an unconditional clean up.

I think the best solution at this time, without going into excessive installer scripting that may end up creating more problems than it will solve, will be to explicitly name and delete the few specific files that are installed in the root game folder, instead of a batch delete. I will experiment a bit with it and see if things can be improved this way.

It did not seem like the v1.75 trunk version did this, so I was more than a wee bit surprised when v1.74.2 did.

Unfortunately, 1.75 will do it as well, so for anyone storing files in the root folder of Oolite, please make backups before you decide to uninstall.

I have already updated the uninstaller in the trunk and this problem should disappear in the next bugfix version. Note that the Resources folder is still batch-deleted during uninstall, but storing external files in Resources instead of own OXP folders is just asking for trouble. The folders where external user files remain safe are the root game folder (as of the upcoming release), the AddOns and the oolite-saves (together with their snapshots sub-folder).