Hi,
Knime Settings & Repositories
during the upgrade form 5.0 to 5.1 a complete reinstall was necessary. Whilst I exported the Knime preferences I was struck by purprise that the repository infomration was not exported.
This makes sense to some extend as deprecated repositories should not be used. However, when adding custom repositories like NodePit or for Selenium Nodes, whcih get lost too, this can easily cause unnecessary confusion.
Suggestion
Would it be a better option to keep the repositories but disable them?
Re-Installation
During full reisntall the setup assistant asked me to remove the current folder which I agreed to. However, the installation failed as the setup assistant was not able to remove the folder completely which require manual intervention.
Since the reinstall also caused the knime.ini as well as all previousely installed extensions to get deleted as well, I feel this could be a major point of improvement since lots of efforts are required to tune the knime.ini but also select and install the repositories.
Suggestion
Upon re-installation I’d suggest to:
- Keep a backup of the knime.ini for easy restore
- Keep a list of installed extensions or create a process to easily re-install previousely installed extensions
- Not require the entire “KNIME” app folder to get removed
- Ensure required deletions of sub-folder (i.e. extensions) can be deleted by the install wizard
Especially the backup of the knime.ini and a re-install process of prev. installed exnteionsextensions would significantly improve the experience and provide the necessary confidence to users to upgrade.
Best
Mike