This is the mail archive of the
cygwin
mailing list for the Cygwin project.
Re: Design of setup.exe can make uninstallation of circularly dependent packages impossible
- From: "Max Bowsher" <maxb at ukf dot net>
- To: "Sridhar Ramesh" <sramesh at andrew dot cmu dot edu>, <cygwin at cygwin dot com>
- Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 23:28:50 +0100
- Subject: Re: Design of setup.exe can make uninstallation of circularly dependent packages impossible
- References: <1526.69.142.182.185.1093294552.squirrel@69.142.182.185>
Sridhar Ramesh wrote:
I'm not sure if this is the right mailing list for this, but I'll give it
a
shot anyway.
I've been trying to uninstall the X11 packages for Cygwin, but a circular
dependency combined with the nature of setup.exe seems to make this
impossible. xorg-x11-bin requires libXft and libXft requires xorg-x11-bin.
So, if both are installed, they become very difficult to remove: First you
select one for uninstallation, then when you go to select the other for
uninstallation you must toggle from Keep to Reinstall first, which
reselects
the first one for installation. The only possible way to select two things
at
once is if both are in the same category, but in this case, they aren't,
so
it appears there really is no way out. The same circular dependency
problem
exists with xorg-x11-bin and libXft1.
It seems this problem could easily be fixed if setup.exe toggled from Keep
to
Uninstall before toggling to Reinstall, instead of the current scheme.
Then
one could select packages for uninstallation without accidentally
activating
dependencies, and circularly dependent packages in different categories
could
thus be uninstalled.
That's a good idea - changing the order might allow a solution to this which
does not involve totally redesigning the package picker. Time for me to dive
into that bit of the code, I think.
Like I said, I'm not sure if this is the right mailing list on which to
point
out this problem. But for the time being, I just wanted to bring this to
some
attention (and also ask if there is any other way to uninstall X11).
Here is fine for initial reports (providing they mention setup.exe in the
subject), and is the correct place for general questions. Cygwin-apps is the
home of any developer-oriented discussion of setup.exe.
Max.
--
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/