Re: Need to uninstall many packages, how?

[Andy Koppe <andy.koppe@gmail.com>]

On 21 July 2010 22:18, Brad De Vries wrote:
> Hello everyone.  Today I accidentally installed many new packages into
> my cygwin setup, namely X and Gnome, and I didn't want them.  How do I
> uninstall them?
>
> How this happened:
> 1) I noticed that I had not installed vim, I know I was shocked too,
> but nonetheless, it's true.
> 2) I ran setup.exe,
>   a) got to the "Select Packages" screen
>   b) searched for vim
>   c) opened the Editors category
>   d) clicked on the first one I saw
>   Oops, I had accidentally selected the GTK interface to vim.
>   e) setup.exe automatically selected the correct vim package as a
> package dependency, so I simply clicked the GTK vim again until it
> read "Skip."
>   f) Clicked <Next> enough times to get it to run

Unfortunately setup.exe's makes no attempt to distinguish between
packages selected by the user and those selected by the dependency
resolver. Too late now, but it's worth getting in the habit of
clicking through to the 'Partial' view to check what's going to change
before clicking Next.

> 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."

Yep, I think that's setup.exe's most infuriating UI failing. Here's a
ridiculous workaround that might just work: click on all those
packages until you get to 'Source', then click on them all once more
to get them to 'Uninstall'. The trick here is to try to avoid getting
the dependency resolver involved. Otherwise, perhaps apt-cyg or
cyg-apt could help.

Andy

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