How to uninstall xorg-x11-devel and all things depending upon it?

[Steve Robbins]

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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