Unable to uninstall VisualGDB

[gojimmypi]

As you may have noticed from my other recent posts, my VisualGDB is not behaving well after the recent attempt to install the ESP-IDF v5 toolchain.

In an act of desperation, I’m trying to uninstall VisualGDB to revert to a known good version that I last installed a few months ago.

That’s not going well, either. I cannot install an order version with a newer version already installed. There’s a dialog box for me to first remove the existing version.

When I try to remove the existing version, I get an error that a license.rtf file cannot be found. See attached for full log.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

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[gojimmypi]

Resolution: run admin command prompt to create a placeholder license.rtf file in the directory noted in dialog box: just a single space, non-blank file.

(in my case: C:\PROGRAM FILES (X86)\MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO\2019\ENTERPRISE\COMMON7\IDE\EXTENSIONS\SYSPROGS\VISUALGDB\license.rtf)

Disabled VsualGDB extension and then ran Visual Studio extension remover. It didn’t actually remove the extension upon completion; I ended up also running Windows “Add or Remove a Program” to remove the new VisualGDB so that I could install the older version.

Note that one of the problems caused by the ESP-IDF v5 install was apparently seen in prior versions. The solution that helped me here was to remove the WSL ~/.espressif folder installed by the ESP-IDF v5 install.sh.

I realize it is not a Sysprogs supported feature at this time, but it is incredibly handy to test a VisualGDB project also in DOS and Linux/WSL ESP-IDF command prompt all on one machine, all with the exact same toolchain and ESP-IDF library.

[support]

Based on your recent posts, you are running into a very typical beginner’s mistake documented here. You are trying to do multiple things at once using non-conventional ways, and then try troubleshooting them by manually overriding arbitrary parameters, which creates further problems exponentially. This never works, always results in lots of frustration and leads to a completely broken environment where you will have to reinstall your entire system to get things working. VisualGDB is not designed to work under these conditions and our support will not help you unless you start doing things one-by-one and carefully documenting each step, so we can review it and point out what went wrong.

Below are the specific examples:

• Instead of doing a clean install of the new toolchain, you ended up somehow merging the old and new toolchain (based on your report that the old IDF checkout went missing). Please do not do this. Please install each toolchain into a separate location and do not move files between them.
• Before you got ESP-IDF working on Windows, you tried using the same toolchain from WSL. Please do not do this. It could create Linux-specific files in some shared directories, preventing the toolchain from working on Windows.
• Instead of uninstalling VisualGDB normally, you somehow ended up deleting the license.rtf file (and possibly others) and then ran into the installer error. Please do not do this; deleting arbitrary VisualGDB files will lead to strange errors. Simply use the Add/Remove Programs GUI in Windows to uninstall VisualGDB.
• You have just submitted another inquiry asking for help integrating an overnight update from Espressif into your environment before you got everything working. Please do not do this; please make sure you got the existing environment working reliably, make backups of everything, and then attempt applying the update using the regular git workflow.

These are just the things you told us about; you are likely changing other parameters behind the scenes, that create more points of failure. Please do take your time and read this page, it provides a very detailed explanation why this approach always leads to problems and gives very solid recommendations for avoiding them.

[gojimmypi]

Things only went sideways for me after I installed the update noted in #33523  – although I probably installed it before the edited comment about needing VisualGDB-5.6.109.4769.msi

My step-by-step was documented in #33578 and admittedly I am using the VisualGDB Espressif toolchains for Visual Studio *also* from DOS/Linux(WSL) command prompts. I understand that the non-Visual Studio use is outside the scope of support for VisualGDB, but this is tremendously helpful to test and validate ESP-IDF projects that are shared with non-VisualGDB users.

In the end, the uninstall and reinstall was although successful, not actually needed nor the root cause of the command-line IDF build problems in DOS/WSL as noted in the GitHub issue referred to in #33589.

I really did try to install the IDF v5 toolchain fresh. I didn’t merge toolchains, and have no idea how it was that they went missing. I did have a SysGCC directory backup from a couple of months ago.

I also did not know that the Visual GDB extension is supposed to be uninstalled via Windows “Add/Remove Programs”. Typically I have used the Visual Studio Extension manager for Visual Studio Extensions. Noted for future reference.

I didn’t get a chance to update things here: I do have everything working again, although only for the 4.x toolchains; I’ve not yet tried to update to ESP-IDF v5. I think I’ll do that on a VM or other computer.

The only reason I sent the message offline was to give you a heads up that a couple more releases (unfortunately all called “5.0”) were since released and may fix things for others:

https://github.com/espressif/idf-installer/releases/tag/offline-5.0

Thanks again for your assistance.

[support]

We always run some basic tests on our toolchain packages before releasing them. We specifically test that the basic projects for most common devices can be built and debugged, and that the toolchain can be installed from scratch on a clean machine with Visual Studio, our latest 3.x Python package and the latest VisualGDB.

If you are experiencing different behavior, it means that you have done something differently. We do not have a crystal ball to see what exactly is different in your setup – all we can do is review the information you provide, compare it to our reference setup, and point out the differences that could be relevant. That’s why we ask for complete detailed screenshots of the entire steps from the very beginning – the root cause is often hidden in fine details (like spaces in paths or overriding something). The post #33578 does not provide any of that information. All it shows is that you are trying to do multiple things at once, so all we can suggest is to do one thing at a time.

Regarding the Espressif releases, they do it fairly often – publish minor updates with the same version, fixing some old issues and sometimes introducing new ones. As we don’t charge our users for toolchain updates, the amount of resources we can put into them is fairly limited – we update them a couple of times per year with major releases from Espressif. We would only do an earlier update if there was solid evidence that it would fix a major problem affecting multiple users. If you absolutely have to use the latest releases from Espressif with VisualGDB, please do take your time to understand how the toolchains, ESP-IDF and Python environments work together, so you can move them between the environment created by the Espressif installer and our toolchain. It requires some effort and troubleshooting, but it’s more realistic than asking us to rebuild, retest and republish the toolchain every time Espressif does a minor update. If you are just looking for a simple way to use ESP-IDF 5.0 (without the latest minor fixes), please do try to install our toolchain in a clean environment. It has passed our tests and we other users have confirmed that it works for them.

P.S. We have published a summary of cleanup steps for troubleshooting ESP-IDF 5.0 installation here.

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