What would be the Best Practises for Activating/de-activating/Deleting a plugin?

Hi friends,

I’ve been reading the Codex over and over again, trying to find my way. I’m writing a new plugin for WP 2.8.X and I want to follow best practises so people will have fun with the plugin.

I do understand that on activation, I’ll need to create the database tables and store the default options.

What confuses me is the de-activation/deletion of the plugin. There is a new “inactive” setting that seem to say: “de-activate the thinghy but don’t delete the options and tables. I though that you had to clean up your act when de-activating???

So, what are the Best Pratices? Do we have to provide an unintall.php and use that if the user click on a Uninstall button? What do we do when the user de-activates the plugin?

I’m ready to read. So, if you have pointers to documentation, I’ll go.

Thank you folks