Does Labview 2018 depend on 2015

[BrendanMitchell]

Hello all, 

Working on cleaning up a lab computer and I want to uninstall LabView 2015 (Nobody has used it in years). However, when I try to uninstall the runtime through the package manager, I get a message saying I need to allow a ton of other things to be uninstalled with it, Including LabView 2018 (which we do use). 

Is LabView 2018 really dependent on 2015, or is there a way around this? 

[altenbach]

Why not just leave the 2015 runtime installed? (I think that newer versions install some older runtimes, I am sure somebody has more information)

[crossrulz]

I know some drivers use 2015 Runtime Engine, I assume for the soft front panels.  But I think there are toolkits as well.  I'm a little surprised it is asking for the entire LabVIEW 2018 to be uninstalled.

[BrendanMitchell]

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@altenbach wrote:

Why not just leave the 2015 runtime installed? (I think that newer versions install some older runtimes, I am sure somebody has more information)

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As I said, just cleaning up. The hard drive was mostly full, and about 130 gig was from NI, so I'm getting rid of everything I can. If leaving the 2015 runtime really is necessary, then of course I'll leave it. It's a strange requirement though, and I wondered if I was misinterpreting something.

[altenbach]

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@crossrulz wrote:

I know some drivers use 2015 Runtime Engine, I assume for the soft front panels.  But I think there are toolkits as well.  I'm a little surprised it is asking for the entire LabVIEW 2018 to be uninstalled.

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If LabVIEW 2018 requires the 2015 runtime engine, that runtime engine can only be uninstalled if 2018 goes too. Leaving the old runtime is the correct approach.

[crossrulz]

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@altenbach wrote:

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@crossrulz wrote:

I know some drivers use 2015 Runtime Engine, I assume for the soft front panels.  But I think there are toolkits as well.  I'm a little surprised it is asking for the entire LabVIEW 2018 to be uninstalled.

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If LabVIEW 2018 requires the 2015 runtime engine, that runtime engine can only be uninstalled if 2018 goes too. Leaving the old runtime is the correct approach.

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Agree 100%.  I'm just also throwing out that it seems very strange to me that LabVIEW (core) would depend on an old RTE.  Just thinking "out loud" here, but it could be from dialogs such as the Instrument Driver Finder or the Find Examples.  Yes, it is a curiosity at this point and not really helpful.

As far as creating space on a hard drive, if you use FPGA I have freed up space by deleting files in C:\NIFPGA\compilation and C:\NIFPGA\corecache.  There is also crash reports that could be deleted (not exactly remembering where those are).  If you can remove the FPGA compilers, those are huge (10GB+ last time I actually cared).

[JensG69]

Perhaps that is a good time to completely start with a fresh Windows installation. ASAIK uninstalling components always leaves some traces...

Regards, Jens

[BertMcMahan]

There's a chance a couple things got "stuck" together with dependencies. If you had 2015 installed when you installed 2018, the 2018 installer might have seen "Oh, he's already got XYZ subcomponent installed as part of 2015, I don't need to reinstall it" and thus coupled the drivers together.

I bet if you uninstalled both 2015 and 2018, then reinstalled 2018, that you'd see the dependency go away.

[RTSLVU]

NI Package Manager is fragile and can leave your computer in a non-bootable state if you are trying to add or remove too much stuff or do it on the wrong order.

How much is too much? What's the right order? Who knows?...

I have had more than one test system be hosed by NIPM so I the best advice I can give is:

Don't fix something that is not broken.