About uninstalling stock DITA-OT plugins

On Slack, I asked about the following error I got, when I tried to uninstall the DITA-OT LwDITA plugin, as shipped with the released distribution:

C:\[...]dita-ot-3.7.2>bin\dita uninstall org.lwdita

Error: Unable to delete file C:\Users\frwe\Local\Development\dita-ot\dita-ot-3.7.2\plugins\org.lwdita\lib\autolink-0.6.0.jar

Radu Coravu answered the following:

Only about the “Unable to delete” problem, I get the same thing on Windows. Maybe you can add a new issue for it on the DITA OT GitHub. You can manually delete the folder “plugins\org.lwdita” and then run “dita -install”.
@jelovirt What happens is that the “dita” process has a class loader which loads all the JAR libraries from plugins, and on Windows when a JAR library is locked by a plugin it cannot be deleted. So basically this means no plugin which has JAR libraries can be elegantly uninstalled on Windows using the “dita” command.

I can confirm that the procedure of removing the plugin from the file system and then let DITA-OT rescan the plugin inventory by using “dita install” does indeed work. From Radu’s answer I guess that this odd behavior might be limited to Windows and is not relevant on proper operating systems. But it might be worth checking it out.

Frank

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