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I guess I am looking for some generic information of how individual packages install/uninstall them self.

The reason I need to do it manually is because I have a personalized cygwin version and don't want to be forced to upgrade. The version I have now is with me for many years and works great in XP, with these small improvements I put into it once a while, which I don't want to miss after an upgrade.

Currently, I want to manually uninstall the following packages (and possibly other packages if left redundant after uninstallation)

emacs-21.2 ruby 1.8

Both of the above were coming with the old setup.exe. For emacs, I found I never used it in windows platform. For ruby, I upgraded to 1.9.1 by compiling the source code.

Thanks

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Setup.exe doesn't force you to upgrade. Just click on the 'Keep' button on the top right of the package selection screen to tell it to stick with your current version. Use the 'Partial' view to keep an eye on what's going to change. If you're still on Cygwin 1.5, you might want to use http://cygwin.com/setup-legacy.exe.

Without setup.exe, you can find the list of files installed by each package in the .lst.gz files in /etc/setup.

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  • Thanks. /etc/setup is what I am looking for. I'll use xargs the file list to invoke rm, do you see any issue except some side effects done by pre-install or post-install scripts? Tried setup-legacy.exe, while it's only asked to uninstall emacs, it went ahead downloading packages and I aborted the process.
    – Codism
    Jun 22, 2010 at 3:39
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    So did you use 'Keep' and the 'Partial' view? With the latter, the packages being downloaded shouldn't have come as a surprise. You could of course invoke the scripts in /etc/preremove manually as well. Any manual messing about with setup.exe's data structures obviously carries the risk that you won't be able to use setup.exe in future either, but I guess that's not a concern for you.
    – ak2
    Jun 23, 2010 at 6:09
  • Thanks for emphasizing 'Keep'. I used it safely removed Emacs and the old ruby version. Just some information if some one is interested in: Emacs took about 43M in 1143 files; ruby 1.8 took 51M in 10728 files. Very surprised to see ruby takes some many files.
    – Codism
    Jun 23, 2010 at 14:50

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