Does not remove Package Cache

[taroxd]

I think C:\ProgramData\Package Cache should also be removed because broken package cache may also cause some problem when using Visual Studio. (And I have actually encountered this problem! The broken Package Cache caused Visual Studio to crash when managing extensions,)

[heaths]

Could you clarify "broken"? VS extension management does not use the WiX Burn package cache directly, so understanding what breaks may help fix the underlying cause.

[taroxd]

I don't know what happened to Package Cache. But I am sure that something went wrong with it.

I uninstalled VS with VisualStudioUninstaller and then reinstalled VS. VS still crashed after I tried to open extension manager.
After that, I uninstalled VS again, removed Package Cache and reinstalled VS. Everything is good now (otherwise I would have performed a clean installation of Windows). And I cannot reproduce that issue any longer.

Anyway, I think Package Cache should be removed by the VisualStudioUninstaller because Package Cache is installed along with Visual Studio.

[heaths]

The Package Cache is actually used for any WiX Burn bundle, which is many outside of Microsoft, and packages in the cache can be share with other products. We can consider removing packages not intended for redistribution, but we can't simply remove the whole Package Cache.

[kamenlitchev]

I also vote for cleaning Package Cache entries for uninstalled by the tool packages. I just uninstalled VS2015, VS2017 and in Package Cache it is full of VS-specific entries (vs_teamExplorerCore, intelliTrace_net, etc.).

P.S. I uninstalled not only VS, but also all VS-related components (SQL, .NET runtimes) from Control Panel.

[livingcreative]

Is it possible to disable this crappy folder at all? it eats too much space. I don't understand why all this distrib files must be kept after software was installed (and especially after it was removed). For me it seems really crazy to keep copy of installation files after installation.