I just... I don't even know what to say. This is some self-parodying shit, right here. Oracle is a fucking userland application. It does not need root to run, and there's really no excuse for needing it to install, except for the fact that they've built it to spew crap all over your installation tree rather than keeping it contained.

You're consistently demonstrating a lack of understanding of several different stages of an application:

1. Install time
2. Configuration time
3. Run time

Install time requires root, unless you're doing a very self-contained application. Which most aren't. (Most server processes would like to write to syslog, for example.)

What you've just described is a hypothetical for a completely broken product. The real solution is "don't create system-wide files in a per-user fashion"

Where did I say in a per-user fashion? Did you get confused when I used the word 'user' as applied to the administrator of the package? I apologize, I presumed you understood that, from the perspective of an application developer, whoever installs and configures said application is a "user".

FUCKING TRACK THE FILES YOU CREATE.

Congratulations! You've accidentally stumbled on one of the solutions of the "clean installer" problem, and incidentally one of the ones used in applications I've developed, packaged and deployed.

But you're still grandly missing the point. Let's take MySQL for example. If you install MySQL, and you tell it to place its database files at /var/some/path, launch it and get it running, then shut it down and modify my.conf to have it place its database files at /var/some/other/path, launch it and get it running, you're going to tell me that it should know to remove the files it placed at /var/some/path?

How the fuck is it supposed to know that? You, the user (or administrator, or whatever term you prefer in this context) have total control of what it knows, and even where it stores its knowledge of what it knows. If you take its brain and put it somewhere else, you can't honestly expect it to clean up after itself.

I feel like I'm having to explain something retardedly simple here.

No it isn't. Chrome's configuration options are at least the rival of any other browser out there, maybe excluding Opera's multi-rendering-engine support.

snort

How long have you been using computers? Do you remember the transition from Mozilla to Firefox? And Chrome has even fewer gui-configurable knobs than Firefox, and that's deliberate.

This is 1990s bullshit. There is no dichotomy between ease of use and power, the belief that there is results from lack of creativity and ingenuity. You can have easy and feature-complete.

You amaze me with your brilliance. Or your inexperience. I'm not sure which.

You cannot have a system that covers all use cases without said system being enormously complex, and that extends to interfaces, at least at configuration time. Every time developers have tried to throw out all the complexity in an interface, they've had to throw out functionality of the system itself, and then add it back in piece by piece until they end up with a mess that's as bad (or worse) as what they started with.

If they're lucky, they've managed to throw out use cases that nobody is going to gripe about.

Which is why postgresql, MariaDB, and MS SQL are so difficult to install, am I right? Oh, wait, no, they're dead fucking simple.

What, you log in as a non-root user and things just go? Because that's what you seemed to be implying earlier. Unless you're talking about their having sane defaults for various settings...except they don't. No database is production-ready out-of-the-box.

I'm just going to put this out there: you work for Oracle, don't you? It's not even the thoughtless apologism defense of them that makes me think so, it's the ignorance and dated technical understanding.

No, I don't work for Oracle. Or anyone who uses them. I don't even know anyone who likes them. When I had to build a database abstraction layer, we chose to skip Oracle support because of the ridiculous technical limitations. Being able to seamlessly handle MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite was sufficient.

I'm just going to put this out there: You're inexperienced, probably with only a couple years at most as a junior sysadmin. You've also never developed any large (more than 100 kloc) applications that you subsequently maintained for any length of time. And you're also very young, I'm going to guess less than 25, maybe even less than 20. In fact, I'd wager you're probably still in college.