After updating to 4.0.5, plugin file VisitsByDaysSinceLastVisit.php is not deleted #16927

After upgrading from 3.5.x to 4.0.5 today, the console queuedtracking:process died with this error:

Starting to process request sets, this can take a while
Uncaught exception in /path/to/matomo/installation/plugins/VisitorInterest/Columns/VisitsByDaysSinceLastVisit.php line 38:
Call to undefined method Piwik\Tracker\Request::getDaysSinceLastVisit()

It seems, the plugin was updated, but an old file wasn't deleted:

plugins/VisitorInterest/Columns:
total 27
-rw-r--r--  1 www  www   366 Dec  8 22:07 PagesPerVisit.php
-rw-r--r--  1 www  www   412 Dec  8 22:07 VisitDuration.php
-rw-r--r--  1 www  www   671 Dec  8 22:07 VisitorDaysSinceLast.php
-rw-r--r--  1 www  www  1963 Dec  8 22:07 VisitorSecondsSinceLast.php
-rw-r--r--  1 www  www  1062 Sep 23 23:20 VisitsByDaysSinceLastVisit.php
-rw-r--r--  1 www  www   371 Dec  8 22:07 VisitsbyVisitNumber.php

At least, after moving the file elsewhere, everything went thru fine. Maybe an issue with the plugin update?

I'm not 100% sure, which version I was upgrading from, but I see this in the terminal buffer: Matomo database will be upgraded from version 3.14.1 to the new version 4.0.5.

@tsteur Seems we are having similar issues with various removed dimensions. Do you think it would maybe make sense to have some kind of dimension integrity checker, that holds a list of dimensions that should have been removed through an update and would remove it from the list of used dimensions if it's still there, so it can't make any problems?

@tsteur created a simple draft on this branch: https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/compare/removedimensions.
Guess might be useful as it seems to happen for wordpress plugin as well. See https://github.com/matomo-org/wp-matomo/issues/393
Other option might be to clean up the options table, so the columns are actually not listed there anymore. But that would trigger the updater to add them again if they are not deleted...

@sgiehl sounds good. We maybe also want to document somewhere (or have a test if possible) to add future removed dimensions to that list

I'll close this issue. With #16934 it should no longer be a problem if a dimension file isn't removed correctly. Matomo will still run correctly and the Integrity checker should suggest to remove the file manually.