[Wine]correctly uninstalling/reinstalling wine?

[Mark Knecht]

On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 08:27:06 -0800, Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org> wrote:

> 
> You're right, this is a bit complex at the moment.  I'll be updating the
> documentation on it.

Good to hear. Thanks.

> 
> Anyway I can summarize it here as "Uninstall packaged versions first,
> then uninstall source versions by going into the source directory and
> doing make uninstall"
> 
> If you're going from old versions, you'll probably want a new config
> file as well.  Back up the old one (or if you don't care about the fake
> windows drive, nuke ~/.wine entirely) and then follow the current
> instructions for new users, which at this point is to run winetools.
> This will soon be handled more automatically via the winecfg program,
> but in the meantime it doesn't hurt to use winetools.
> 

I know you're implying this but, being explicit, I think nuking the
.wine directory is bad advise until you make sure the new version is
running. Normally this would imply having to reinstall all Windows
apps which can take hours. What if the new version of Wine doesn't run
the Windows app you need? This has happened a lot to me and I find I
have to go back to the old version of Wine. I think it's wise to back
up the .wine directory until you're really sure of things.

Maybe there's some strategy for setting up the actual drive locations
of installed programs that could survive this? Maybe a directory for
C:\Program Files that's not actually under .wine and pointed to by a
link? Much appreciated if we can capture the registry settings so that
Window apps would find what they expect.

If you guys could come up with some ways to do this, document it and
get it into WineTools that would be really great. (Nothing like a
small challenge, 'eh?) ;-)

- Mark