Burner mining drills (and possibly others) in PyAE no longer auto deconstruct. This worked in PyAL and in the PyAE beta, but no longer works in the portal version.

I just downloaded Pyanodon's Alternative Energy and only its dependencies, and the burner mining drills deconstruct correctly for me. Could you share a factorio-current.log, a save, or the full mod list where you see it not working?

Try with mechanical inserters aimed at it. One filtered to remove ash and one to add fuel. That will break it.

Okay, so the logic that is stopping the drill from being deconstructed is "inserter chain" detection. This is to keep from breaking the chain if you have burner drills being fueled with inserters from one to the next. It thinks the ash extractor is taking fuel to another drill.

What do you think is a good solution to this? Do we need to check the filters on extracting inserters and see if it can remove fuel? Or would it be enough to make inserter chain detection disabled via a setting?

A setting you could turn off could work well in this instance.. you're not likely to be using inserter chains with pY since you still need to deal with the ash anyway.

This setting is added in 0.3.6. You will need to uncheck the box "do not remove drills with inserters..." (kind of a long name, hope it makes sense). You can do this in the runtime mod settings while playing your current save.