The plugin manager should calculate the md5sum of every file that it installs. This should allow it to tell whether a file has been modified since it was installed. This could be very useful when upgrading / remove modules / themes, as to have a reminder that it has been customized. This should help prevent accidental removal of modifications.

Comments

jabapyth’s picture

jabapyth commented

thats a great idea. although, what do you think should happen when plugin manager finds a file that *has* been modified? I think it would be fairly difficult to determine automatically whether to keep or delete it. In the 'normal' upgrade process (if one were to upgrade a module by hand) wouldn't the file be deleted anyway?
Or is this just to prevent deletion of modifications made *by hand*, eg w/ a text editor? In that case, is this really a valuable function? -- it seems that that would only be useful to developers, and might be confusing to the typical user.

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
commented

Note that http://drupal.org/project/file_integrity does this already to some extent - could be something to just depend on or to copy code from.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Since the plugin manager has the ability to update and remove files, I just thought that it would be nice for users to get a notice before overwriting any customized files. Just one quick md5file() for each file during installation and one more for each for before removing it. Anything that wasn't installed via the plugin manager will just be assumed to be unchanged.