Hello,
I need to uninstall xorg-x11-devel. I found this simple task to be
incredibly frustrating, so I'm posting my experience to see whether
there's an better way to do things.
I fired up Cygwin Setup, selected the package for uninstall, and
proceeded to the end. However, there were a couple of packages
depending on xorg-x11-devel, including libXft-devel. So I ended up on
a page informing me of these dependencies, which had a little checkbox
at the bottom to reinstall xorg-x11-devel so that dependencies were
unbroken. The box was checked. The first time through I didn't see
that box way down at the bottom of my screen and so nothing happened
when I clicked "Next".
Next time through, I saw the box. So I went back and tried to find
the packages that depend on xorg-x11-devel. The default view for
selecting packages is grouped by category. I opened the X11 category,
but libXft-devel was nowhere to be found. I couldn't find any way to
search for a package by name. I tried using the "cygcheck" command,
but it didn't tell me anything about the package category. Neither
did http://cygwin.com/packages/ Ultimately, I clued in that there is
a "Full" view where the packages are sorted by name. So I was able to
find them.
I navigated the full view of hundreds of package names, found
libXft-devel, selected "Uninstall", navigated to xorg-x11-devel,
selected "Uninstall", then clicked "Next". To my surprise, it was
telling me that uninstalling xorg-x11-devel would cause a problem
because libXft-devel depends on it. I thought I had asked to remove
both. So I went back and discovered that libXft-devel was selected
for "Keep".
This time I did it in the opposite order: first select xorg-x11-devel
for uninstall, then select libXft-devel for uninstall. On the next
page, I got a message saying that removing libXft-devel will cause a
problem because xorg-x11-devel depends on it.
After another 10 minutes, I came to the following conclusions:
(1) Packages xorg-x11-devel and libXft-devel depend on each other.
(2) If one is selected for uninstall, then selecting the other for
uninstall undoes the first selection.
The only way I can see for uninstalling a package is to repeatedly
click on the "New" column, cycling through the various options:
"Skip", "x.y.z", "Keep", "Uninstall", etc. My hypothesis for (2) is
that when I cycle through a particular version, it automatically
updates the dependencies to install. But that's just a guess.
It may be that I'm misusing Cygwin Setup in some manner. I'd be
interested in learning how to do this better.
On the other hand, I have used synaptic
(http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/) with both Debian and RedHat systems.
It works really well and I wonder if it could be adapted to cygwin
as well -- or perhaps its successor, the Smart Package Manager
(http://labix.org/smart).
Regards,
-Steve
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