Daniel Dimitrov wrote: I've never experienced the "cannot install" error and that is why I can't imagine why a file that is named install.xml is going to do any harm. At the end joomla looks for extension-name.xml in the root folder. Everything else gets ignored. (or at least this is what I thought)
That's what I thought as well and it took me quite some time to figure out why the uninstall of your extension wasn't completed.
Just in case you're curious, this is the code the installer uses to detect the manifest file.
public function findManifest()
{
// Get an array of all the XML files from the installation directory
$xmlfiles = JFolder::files($this->getPath('source'), '.xml$', 1, true);
// If at least one XML file exists
if (!empty($xmlfiles))
{
foreach ($xmlfiles as $file)
{
// Is it a valid Joomla installation manifest file?
$manifest = $this->isManifest($file);
...
...
...
It's located in this file
/libraries/joomla/installer/installer.php
As you can see JFolder::files is told to search recursive through all subdirectories.
I guess it's the same function that is also used on install and some extensions still don't put their manifest files into the root folder of the zipfile.