[New Feature]: Add ability to display warning to user before upgrade

[Masamune3210]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

While upgrading programs, all my explorer windows closed with no warning due to WinMerge closing it as part of its upgrade path. Would it be possible to add a warning to programs known to interfere with others as part of their upgrades or installs?

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

Add a upgrade after user issues command to the tone of "This upgrade might close other programs as part of its upgrade, make sure you save your work first!" with a prompt Y/N before continuing and a flag to the upgrade command to ignore possible upgrade closures to disable the prompt for scripts and people who don't care

[denelon]

We've seen this with programs aborting Windows Terminal and added a key to the manifest schema. This sounds like a similar scenario, but might need to be handled a bit differently.

[sredna]

WinMerge closing it as part of its upgrade path

WinMerge uses Inno Setup which does support the Restart Manager. It would perhaps be nice if we could figure out if WinMerge is doing something special or if there is an issue with Inno.

[Masamune3210]

All I know is it kills all open explorer windows on install upgrade or uninstall because it adds a properties sheet which requires explorer to be closed. haven't done much research been at work all day

[Masamune3210]

Actually I think it adds a context menu entry rather than a properties sheet

[Masamune3210]

I think it manually closes all open explorer windows as part of its install script, so there might not be much able to be done to mitigate it other than a warning

[sredna]

But does it have custom code to close Explorer or does it use Restart manager?

Manually closing Explorer is broken by design since other applications (anything with a open/save dialog) might also have the shell extension .DLL loaded.

Restart manager is supposed to fix this. You give it a list of files, it closes all apps using said files, you replace/update the files and finally you tell Restart manager to restart the apps. Explorer is somewhat special since it also owns the taskbar and that might be the same process as a File explorer window.

[Masamune3210]

I'm not sure, this is all from observation, not taking a look at the scripts or anything. I don't know if it tries to kill all of explorer or not, as I run File Explorer as a separate process from the taskbar for stability reasons

[denelon]

What kind of name were you thinking for the manifest key?

"VolatileInstaller" as a boolean?

We could provide a message like:

"This installer is known to interfere with running applications"

I'm open to suggestions here.