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Re: Need to uninstall many packages, how?


On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 1:11 AM, Brad De Vries <devriesbj@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 11:01 PM, Alex Leigh <leigh@hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 5:18 PM, Brad De Vries wrote:
>>>
>>> After several minutes of downloading, verifying, installing,
>>> configuring, post-installing, etc. I realized that it installed a lot
>>> of X and Gnome related packages. ?Now I want to remove them all
>>> because I don't want them. ?However, when I re-run setup.exe and try
>>> to click the various packages to uninstall, it changes other packages
>>> that I had previously selected to uninstall back to "keep."
>>> The only option I see that's available to me is to completely
>>> uninstall cygwin and then re-install the packages I do want. ?That
>>> does not sound fun and I'm hoping someone has a better idea of how to
>>> remove lots of related packages.
>>>
>>
>> I've also run into this annoyance and I found another workaround you
>> could try. First, empty the Cygwin package cache on your local
>> computer. Then run Setup.exe, choosing "Install from local directory".
>> Then you can click on packages to uninstall them without cycling
>> through the "Reinstall" option which is what's causing dependent
>> packages to be reset to "Keep".
>>
>> Alex
>
> Thanks Alex, and everyone else that made suggestions. ?I'll give this
> a try tomorrow and report back.
>
> BTW, I second the motion to fix setup.exe.
>
> Brad.

Well, I tried several times to get rid of all the undesired packages
and I ended up deleting the entire cygwin install and re-installing it
-- what a pain!

The biggest problem I ran into with the suggestion to "install from
local directory" was that it lost all the categories, not good, along
with the dependencies, a good thing.  What I tried to do was use the
original setup directory details and get a list of all the packages in
the Gnome and X categories.  Then I re-ran setup without the original
setup directory and tried to find the packages to uninstall, but the
vast majority were not listed.  I tried again with only package cache
removed and the original setup.ini in place, then all the categories
were listed but the dependencies were back.

I tried various other options but in the end, it was easier to delete
and re-install.

Anyway, thanks for everyone's suggestions.

Brad.

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