On 9/24/2010 10:54 AM, Benjamin Franz wrote:
Until Cygwin's developers decide the join the rest of the window's universe in having an *uninstaller* it will remain "not installed - ever" on many people's systems, including mine. It is completely unacceptable that it is happy to install, but that you have to *manually* rip it out piece-by-piece if you ever want to uninstall it.
You make Cygwin sound like some kind of malware that gets its hooks into the system and has to be forced to let go.
Effective uninstallation is easy. Stop any Cygwin services. (sshd, crond, etc.) Stop X. Delete c:\cygwin. Delete icons. Done.
That's a condensed version of this item from the Cygwin FAQ:
http://www.cygwin.com/faq/faq-nochunks.html#faq.setup.uninstall-all
There are a few more things you could clean up, but they're all harmless to leave laying around.
An uninstaller would be nice, but it's not as desirable as for programs that do scatter files all over the system, set up auto-runs, install drivers, etc.