Comment by yumashka
7 years ago
Citation: "When KFR is being used, the October 2018 Update will delete the original, default Known Folder locations. Microsoft imagined that this would simply remove some empty, redundant directories from your user profile. No need to have a Documents directory in your profile if you're using a redirected location, after all."
Sorry for harsh language, but this is not a bug. This is a complete brain damage of those who decide to implement such behaviour.
I have redirected Documents. And there are A LOT of programs that directly try to use C:\Users\user\Documents instead of redirected.
Sorry for harsh language, but this is not a bug. This is a complete brain damage of those who decide to implement such behaviour.
That's not "harsh", harsh is what happened to the unlucky users who lost data because no one on the development team bothered to call it out. It should be an implicitly understood rule that you NEVER remove a file you did not create, unless the user explicitly asked to, but I guess MS considers it acceptable to do anything to a user's system after they convinced everyone to take forced updates as being acceptable too.
> but I guess MS considers it acceptable to do anything to a user's system after they convinced everyone to take forced updates as being acceptable too.
This. Once you get in the mindset that you know better than the user, it's not a big jump to "I know these directories should be empty, any content is leftover garbage, let's remove them".
> you NEVER remove a file you did not create
Absolutely this, with a followup of "and if you're 'helpfully' deleting an unused folder, check that it's unused first!"
Given that this was (stupid) desired behavior, making sure Documents didn't have stuff in it should have been a screamingly obvious step. It would still have been utterly unacceptable, it could still have created weird downstream bugs when users installed things that target the now-missing default Documents location, but at least it wouldn't have set a bunch of data on fire without any warning.
But then, I guess relying on common sense after the first terrible decision is made is never going to work. There's a reason "never break user space" is rule 1 for Linux updates...
Microsoft doesn’t consider the OS to be the “user’s system”. They clearly see it as something they rent to the user a little bit each day. If the user wants to keep the system for a little longer, he/she has to make a special request to Microsoft that they hold off for a bit before retaking control of the OS.
"Windows is a service and updates are part of that service. So if you could just go ahead and reboot now, that would be terrific."
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Recently was reading the blog of the team upgrading conhost. On it they joke several times that the developers doing the work were not even born yet.
Well, this is the kind of thing that happens when your whole team is interns and the "senior" is 28.
Reading the associated bugs on github I also learned that there were lots of complaints about the new console, not on features, but breaking compatibility that is. Guess no one thought to start a new project, rather than changing a 30 year-old one that hadn't been touched in 20.
TL;DR: At least one codger is needed on teams doing this kind of work to give perspective.
More precisely: at least one Raymond Chen is needed on every team in Microsoft.
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> Guess no one thought to start a new project, rather than changing a 30 year-old one that hadn't been touched in 20.
To be fair, that's what led to Powershell and Command Prompt co-existing. I guess Microsoft wanted to reduce the number of console backends.
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>NEVER remove a file you did not create
Seems like common sense, but Microsoft has been doing this for a while. In Windows 7 (not sure about later releases) the OS runs a 'Desktop Cleanup' periodically that deletes shortcuts to network locations it can no longer connect to. God forbid your network drives don't map one day and Windows decides to nuke all your desktop shortcuts... this actually happened to a user I was doing support for and they were understandably livid
Disable windows 10 automatic maintenance.
Windows is going into the Apple direction I guess.
How about 'delete the folder if empty'? Why on earth didn't they think to do that?
Yes, seriously. I would still think it's totally unjustifiable as a 'helpful' change, but at least it'd be causing problems like "hey, this install failed, how do I fix it?" rather than "where's all my stuff?"
That, and I'm just a bit shocked that "the folder should be empty, so delete it" didn't just naturally make people think "obviously I should check if that's true first". Even if it's not a total fix, the failure to add that is it's own layer of screwup.
Even that could potentially be a breaking change, like if the folder was expected to be there by some application.
That can be solved by updating the broken applications. Deleted data is never going to come back unless you have a backup.
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How does that even work? Does Windows not have proper hard/soft links? Don't you maybe have to do some weird things to get around them?
Windows/NTFS has links, but they aren't used for this (and software support for them is ... iffy, which can be an issue with backup tools etc, for which they aren't just transparent). These "known folders" are roughly implemented as environmental variables containing paths to the configured folder.
Soft and hard links are only supported on NTFS formatted disks.
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They are used for the old "My Documents" folders though, right? So why not use them here too, just as a fallback?
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Links have been a feature since vista, at least
Since Win 2k; I'm using Link Shell Extension[1] that puts nice and simple GUI feature in context menus and on icons (green shortcut arrow for example or chain).
[1] - http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext...
Do they work though? I remember trying to use them in the past and never found them to function exactly right.
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> This is a complete brain damage of those who decide to implement such behaviour.
I'd love to read what Linus Torvalds would say about it.
There are programs that have bugs before the first line of code is written. This is one such case.
This. How much lost time, panic, and rage did carelessly deleting these folders cause? It was a dire mistake.
This seems like a common sense thing that every intern would consider. Why the Microsoft development team didn't really raises some questions not only about their QA, but about their whole development process.