Unconventionally named Application Support directory #3459

If a user intends to uninstall the app, it would be nice if the related cache data (the potentially huge blockchain cache) were deleted too. According to common convention, a directory created under Library, say: ~/Library/Application Support/${TheApp} should match, or start with, the name of its creator. Dependent files can start with "TheApp", e.g. you can have TheApp-common and so on.

In our case of the GUI BitCoin client, the application is distributed as "Bitcoin-Qt" and as a consequence anyone looking for related files will fail finding ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin as it does not match =~ /^Bitcoin-Qt.*/. AppZapper is a common example of this.

Related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5029410/how-to-detect-files-related-to-an-app-on-a-mac

Note that the bundle ID could still remain as "org.bitcoin.Bitcoin-Qt". Since plist files are generally in the reverse-DNS identifier form, they are just substring matched (/Bitcoin/ in the ideal case).

In principle this could be taken up in the rebranding effort (#3203), but I'm very careful with renaming executables, file names and registry keys on purpose because people will effectively lose their old settings unless a whole lot of compatibility renaming code is added (and it's sooo easy to miss some scenario...).

Thanks for your reply and pointer to ticket #3203 - I know this might seem like a minute issue, but it could become a point of bitrot in the OS X version.

Btw without TDD I prolly get this mixed up but, just for fun:

if hasNewDataDirectory:
    if hasOldDataDirectory:
        warnAboutOldStillBeingPresent()
elif hasOldDataDirectory:
    migrateDataDirectoryLocation()
else:
    initializeNewDataDirectory()

;-)

Similar issue as "Use AppData\Local instead of AppData\Roaming #2391" or "Uninstaller should have option to remove data (except for wallet) #993", except for OSX instead of Windows.

Care would have to be taken not to remove the wallet.dat on uninstall.

I don't think this is worth fixing. The biggest problem is already covered by #993, which is that the standard way people uninstall the wallet won't get rid of the blockchain data, and that manually deleting this is risky if the user is not careful.

Once a user finds out that they didn't save as much space as expected, they'll Google how to manually do this. If they use Finder to look at their Library directory, they can't possibly miss "Bitcoin". If they use the console and are lazy enough to use tab completion, they won't miss it either.

That said, I like the idea of renaming the app to just "Bitcoin" on OSX, as "QT" doesn't add any value and I don't think it has much brand value these days, unlike e.g. "Bitcoin Core". But such a rename doesn't seem worth the risks @laanwj described.

I created #11959 specifically for OSX uninstall.

I created #11959 specifically for OSX uninstall.

Let's continue discussion there, then