"Unneeded" packages are hard to get rid of in Setup

"Unneeded" packages are hard to get rid of in Setup

[Lavrentiev, Anton (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [C]]

Hi All,

I was updating my Cygwin installation at home and that had accumulated some "Unneeded" packages, which were very hard to deal with:

The default disposition is "Keep" (while logically, since they are "safe to be removed", it should have been "Uninstall")
so it nearly got me a carpal syndrome to manually click on each of those pesky packages to select "Uninstall", individually
(I don't think there's a group update -- I can't "select" more than a single line with the mouse);

But that wasn't all!

When I re-ran Setup I still had quite a few of the packages showing up as "Unneeded" -- I suppose because they were the
dependencies of some of the packages that had just been removed previously.  I took me a dozen of iterations of re-running
Setup, and each time selecting the packages, again, individually, and then seeing a fewer left for the next Setup run, etc...

FTR, the most stubborn to go away was the old python stuff...

So I have a question:  from the usability standpoint, can "Uninstall" be the default action suggested for the "Unneeded" please?
If Setup cannot figure out the circular dependencies and needs a few rounds like in my case, at least the user does not have to
re-click everything every single time!  Or better yet if Setup could do both, suggest "Uninstall" and figure out the order of the
package removal so that all the dependencies are satisfied, but that's a considerable improvement, and is left as a suggestion.

Thanks!

Anton Lavrentiev
Contractor NIH/NLM/NCBI

UPD: "Unneeded" packages are hard to get rid of in Setup

[Lavrentiev, Anton (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [C]]

UPDATE:

Running "cygcheck -rvs" on the updated installation (after all the "Unneeded" packages were gone),
revealed that a few packages had become "Incomplete":

base-files
libMagickCore6_6
libMagickCore7_9
perl
perl-mapages
squid

I re-ran Setup and chose these packages to "Reinstall" from the "Up-To-Date" list.

All of them were "(auto-selected)" previously, and I suppose with re-install they lost their
status and are now installed as "Picked" (by me), so they won't be tracked as "Unneeded" anymore
(which is not a big deal but not exactly as it has been intended, either).

Anyways, the reinstall of these has fixed the issue with their completeness, and all seems now to be in a good working order.

I have a detailed report (cygcheck -rvs) of which files went missing from those packages (if anybody wants to see them).

Anton Lavrentiev
Contractor NIH/NLM/NCBI