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PuTTY bug win-silent-uninstall

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summary: Silent uninstall not possible on Windows
class: bug: This is clearly an actual problem we want fixed.
depends: msi-installer
fixed-in: 0.67 5c5879b99d2a0785095a384f48a2d934e1b2d4c5

The PuTTY .exe uninstaller has a /silent switch (and some others such as /verysilent); however, none of these actually allows a silent uninstall, as the user is always prompted to decide whether they want to remove all traces of PuTTY use (saved sessions and random seed file) from the machine:

PuTTY Uninstallation

Remove saved sessions and random seed file?

If you hit Yes, ALL Registry entries associated
with PuTTY will be removed, as well as the
random seed file. THIS PROCESS WILL
DESTROY YOUR SAVED SESSIONS.
(This only affects the currently logged-in user.)

If you hit No, uninstallation will proceed, but
saved sessions etc will be left on the machine.

Last time we looked, this was unavoidable with the Inno Setup installer engine we were using (the "skipifsilent" flag was not supported in the [UninstallRun] section), as long as we wanted to offer this choice to users uninstalling interactively.

This is fixed in 0.67 by the provision of a MSI installer (which doesn't offer the option of clearing out old settings at all). The Inno Setup (.exe) installer still has this problem in 0.67.

For existing installations of the Inno Setup installer where you want to silently migrate to the MSI installer (which requires uninstalling the Inno Setup one first) or just uninstall, there are a couple of options:

The final release of the Inno Setup installer, 0.68, will not prompt to remove settings (it won't support this at all). So you'll be able to (silently) install that, then silently uninstall it. (The snapshot Inno Setup installers are already built this way, if you're impatient.)
(The MSI installer does not have this option either; we've decided it's not sensible, given that it doesn't remove all users' settings. If you want settings removed, you must run 'putty -cleanup' before uninstallation.)
If you don't want to involve post-0.67 installers, a workaround is apparently to delete putty.exe (which is invoked to put up the prompt) before starting the uninstall process. This is described in more detail here.

(A suspected problem with the above migration is that if a program such as Pageant is running at the time you run the Inno Setup uninstaller, the machine can end up with no Pageant; we think the Inno Setup uninstaller leaves a note to remove the currently-in-use pageant.exe on next reboot, which the MSI installer is unaware of, so the MSI's pageant.exe gets removed. Or something like that.)

(The git commit id listed in Fixed-in is actually after 0.67, even though 0.67 has an MSI installer. That's not an error; I prepared the 0.67 MSI ad-hoc, after 0.67 itself was released.)

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Audit trail for this bug.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2017-09-14 10:25:47 +0100)

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