Question: How to uninstall older casks?

[TheZoc]

Hello,

How should I uninstall older casks?

Today I was willing to upgrade VLC, since an update was released. Apparently, I couldn't uninstall the old cask:

brew uninstall vlc

This fails... So, I did:

rm -rf /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/vlc/2.1.3
brew cask install vlc

Is this how I'm supposed to upgrade the apps ? Is there a different way to deal with outdated apps which needs an upgrade?

Thanks in advance!

[rolandwalker]

What you did is the only way that works 100% of the time for now. If the app can update itself, that also works. brew cask install --force vlc works, but it leaves the old copy of VLC in the Caskroom directory.

This is very far from ideal, and is one reason we can only consider this to be alpha-quality software.

In #3066 and other places, we are currently improving the book-keeping needed for uninstall to work in all cases, and working toward an upgrade command verb as well.

[TheZoc]

@rolandwalker, Nice to know, thank you!

Just in case, if I want to completely uninstall an app (that was updated), is there any procedure I need to do to make sure it was uninstalled without leaving any "garbage" behind? (for example, if it was installed using a install section).

#3066 looks great... Sadly, I'm mainly a C++ programmer, and ruby is a pretty much unknown language for me. If at some point I decide to study it (no time now 😦), I'll try to contribute. :)

[vitorgalvao]

If the app was installed via install, as long as the cask contains an uninstall, it should do the job (it’s not foolproof, though, it certainly can leave some stuff behind, depending on how through the unintall stanza was). For a .app, uninstalling it via homebrew-cask is the equivalent of throwing it out manually (you can pretty much just delete the directory). Regarding other files, such as configurations, there is some talk on handling those, but currently they are not removed.

The original question was answered, so I think we can close this. Naturally, @TheZoc, if there’s something you’d like a clarification on, feel free to ask.