module uninstall functionality

That's a very interesting problem to uncover!

I agree that uninstalling this module can be a "dangerous" operation, but sadly a hook_uninstall() implementation that would unpublish the deleted content is not feasible because there could hundreds or thousands of items in the trash, and the uninstall operation would just time out and leave the site in an inconsistent state.

I think a reasonable approach would be to *prevent* the module from being uninstalled if there is content in trash, and ask the user to either restore or purge that content before being able to uninstall it.

Good point on the overhead of possibly having too items to modify on hook_uninstall. The alternate makes great sense, and now that I think about it is in use in a lot of other modules.