Unexpected outcome after manual update to fix the "mini issue"

paulypudner

My system: 13" MacBook Pro (mid-2012 mod.) running OS X10.11.6.

When I install updates I customarily rename my current apps. as appnamex.oldapp.app so that I have a fall-back version should the new install fail to load correctly. However, in this instance, after I renamed my old ver. of 1PW (ver.6.3.n) to "1Password 6.oldapp.app", I then proceeded to install the new ver. 6.6.1. But unexpectedly, the new version OVERWROTE the old (backup) version. Furthermore, the update didn't reflect any version difference between the old backup file and the new update, so my backup version was changed to the new executable but the NAME remained exactly the same as it had been, including the "oldapp" insertion: i.e., 1Password 6.oldapp.app.

As a consequence, the new version could not execute because my command icon (in the Dock) was calling for the program 1Password 6.app, which was not present in my apps folder. Of course I couldn't immediately see what had happened because I had expected to see the new file name, "1Password 6.app" AND the old backup file, "1Password 6.oldapp.app."

So... I decided to restore my "backup" and discovered that when restored to its original file name, my "backup" was now magically transformed into the new version. Sadly, I have lost the evidence of this because the old version had been overwritten.

In the future I'll be more careful about choosing file names, but shouldn't 1PW's install process have ignored my "1Password 6.old.app" file?

paulypudner

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1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Sync Type: Not Provided

rickfillion

Hi @paulypudner,

Hrmmmmm... yea that would surprise me as well. I wonder if our pkg installer tries to be smart about that. I'll have to ping Rudy who maintains the installer to see what he thinks of this. I'm struggling to decide whether this is a feature or a bug. I could see it being handy if someone decides to rename it to say something like "1Password.app" (with the " 6"). But I can certainly see why it would be annoying in your case.

The issue with the Dock icon has more to do with the Dock being relatively simple and pointing to a specific path as opposed to the various other ways that they could things that would be more useful for you as a user.

Rick

rickfillion

I've just talked to Rudy about this and he said that this is standard behavior for pkg installers on the Mac, unfortunately.

Rick

paulypudner

Thanks for the feedback.

Since this is known Mac installer behavior, wouldn't it behoove agile bits coders to avoid replicating app names from one version to the next? Wouldn't a simple solution have been to go one level deeper into the version string when naming the next version of an app, e.g., "1Password 63.app" then "1Password 66.app" and so on?

I know it would probably be futile to ask Apple to change their behavior.

Meanwhile, I'll take responsibility for using more care when naming my backups.

paulypudner

AGAlumB

@paulypudner: Indeed, that's something we did going from earlier major versions (e.g. "1Password 5.app"), but not minor updates. I think this is pretty standard. On occasion I've had apps use a scheme like the one you're suggesting ("Ignite_1_3_0_Mac.app" is the only one I cold find hanging around), but that's pretty oddball behaviour.

This is a bit off-topic, but it sounds like you're just keeping a "backup" of the old version of 1Password locally in your Applications folder. This really won't help you if something goes wrong on your system, so an external backup like Time Machine (and offsite) would be better. They'd not only be more useful if something happens to your computer, but they can also offer versioning, so that you could simply restore from a known-good state a week ago, for example, which would include whichever versions of apps you had at that time too. And in the case of 1Password in particular, there's really no need to keep around old copies (this can actually cause trouble, since macOS sometimes will launch the wrong copy of 1Password mini) since you can download virtually any version from our update site:

https://app-updates.agilebits.com

Not that I want to encourage you to use an outdated version, but it's there if you need it for whatever reason. If, however, you still prefer your current practice, simply zipping the app before installing a new one should help. Cheers! :)

paulypudner

Brenty,

I appreciate your backup advice, and I do maintain external TM and a clone backups.

My thinking was that if I encountered an immediate problem during an update, I could resort to the most recent (and handiest) working version as a temporary fix while I looked into the update problem. This was my first experience with a loader grabbing a duplicate file name... ever.

I'll drop this strategy, primarily because I've never had a problem with a 1PW update. It became habit after experiencing update failures with other apps.

Drew_AG

I'm glad to hear Brenty's advice was helpful! Thank you for elaborating on why you were keeping the backup copies, I can certainly understand the logic behind that.

If you need anything else, please let us know. Have a great weekend! :)