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Comment by throwaway290 | Hacker News Reader

> sometimes people do actually want to clean up

There are two scenarios I want the cleanup to happen: 1) app is buggy and I'm trying to fix it by reinstalling from scratch, 2) I need to free disk space. Both are pretty rare, and in the second case I am already using a specialized utility like DaisyDisk to see where my space has gone.

> transient data files

/tmp? That gets actually auto cleaned up!

> settings

Maybe. Do we want macOS to introduce the concept of uninstall to shave a few of those kilobytes? Hoping programmers do not screw up with rm -rf /? I already hate it when I have to use an installer so that's a no from me.

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> 1) app is buggy and I'm trying to fix it by reinstalling from scratch

You don't specify and it's highly dependent but in most cases when an app is misbehaving it's an issue with preferences. You can reset most apps with `defaults` without blowing away all its data. There are some intricacies with how macOS handles preferences, so you should avoid manually editing related .plist.

Note that if I am trying to fix an app that I want to keep using I sure as hell may want to keep the preferences.

The case where I want it to auto clean up is where it is repeatedly broken and I never really got to using and configuring it yet. It's pretty rare.

> Note that if I am trying to fix an app that I want to keep using I sure as hell may want to keep the preferences.

Of course, `man defaults`. You can modify the preferences and potentially fix it, backup preferences, etc. Again I must stress that you use `defaults`, the .plist on disk isn't always accurate even if you terminate the app and reboot the machine.

> The case where I want it to auto clean up is where it is repeatedly broken and I never really got to using and configuring it yet. It's pretty rare.

There isn't really a one size fits all perfect automatic solution. Not all apps are good macOS citizens.

So the only scenarios automatic uninstall is useful are far and between and even then no one size fits all, which is why I don't like the idea...

Cache files are frequently non-trivial in size and go into ~/Library/Caches, and those are not cleaned up automatically.

/tmp isn't really suitable for storing the exact kinds of persistent config files that you say shouldn't be uninstallable.

How on earth transient data files is the same thing as persistent config files?

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