Re: [HEADSUP] Let's start a Cygwin 1.7 release area

[Brian Dessent <brian@dessent.net>]

Jörg Schaible wrote:

> > That reminds me of something... I've always been a bit annoyed that
> > people always resort to manually editing the registry to
> > remove Cygwin,
> > when umount is the documented and preferred method.  But now, we will
> > have no such utility to suggest and so to remove Cygwin the
> > user will be
> > forced to use regedit.
> 
> regtool remove {HKLM,HKCU}\Software\Cygwin\???

I suppose I didn't state my point very well.  Yes, there are Cygwin
tools for manipulating the registry.  But the registry is an
implementation detail, and you should not need to know anything about
registry keys to uninstall Cygwin.  At the moment this can be
accomplished via "umount -A" (and "cygrunsrv -R") with zero knowledge of
where the mount table happens to be implemented, or that there even is a
registry.

With the mount table no longer stored in the registry, we will have no
way around saying "you must remove such-and-such key from the
registry."  This is bad, IMHO.

A separate issue is that even if we document a proper procedure for
removing Cygwin (as we currently do in the FAQ), users often don't read
manuals and just plunge in and try to delete stuff.  They fail because
they forgot to stop services first, or because they don't understand
file ACLs.  By adding a new key in the registry we make it increasingly
likely that in their fervor to dive in and delete things without reading
docs they will miss yet another step.  I want to finally solve this for
good by making a program that encapsulates all this knowledge so that
they don't have to RTFM, and so that they just have a nice thing to
click on like every other well-behaved Windows program.  I think it's
been a requested feature more than once.

Brian