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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

This is a fairly common programming mistake to make, nothing to do with Adobe being invasive. I remember when eve online's updater deleted C:\boot.ini in 2007 for example:

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/about-the-boot...

That said I completely agree Adobe's software is disgustingly invasive, just not for this particular reason.

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A commmon mistake...

No. It's an idiot mistake. It's an idiot mistake that should have been caught by code review. It should have been caught by release engineering. It never should be made in the first place because deleting files that your software didn't create in the first place is asinine.

If your software does this you should be fired.

End users should be free to install software without having to sort through their backup/recovery process.

This is not a common programming mistake to make at all, I'd also say it has everything to do about being invasive. The EVE reference you mentioned was 9 years ago for a video game in an early release stage.

I don't know the exact nature of the Adobe bug, but Steam had a similar problem recently too "Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything on system owned by user" https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671

Honestly (and imnsho) the prevalence of that sort of thing makes it even less excusable for a large company like Adobe.

That is incredible.

> Line 468: rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/"*

Without a check for $STEAMROOT validity. I'm not sure you couldn't sue Valve for the incredible recklessness. That is just beyond the pale.

In general you can't. Most all software EULAs pretty much says you agree there is no warranty and no liability no matter what happens.

EULAs are not magic, at least in sane jurisdictions. A lot of stuff they contain is not legally binding.

Holy shit how have I never heard of this. That's an insane bug for Steam to let slip

EVE had already been out for 4 years at that point - much younger than it is today, but hardly at an early release stage.

EVE wasn't early release stage at that point. But: EVE at the time had a startup configuration file `boot.ini` inside the game folder. They tried to delete a game file, but if the game was not installed on C:\, a couple of path variables were empty and it realpathed to `C:\boot.ini`, if I remember correctly.

Can you more clearly define "common" for me?

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