Cygwin deployment

Let me preface this by saying Cygwin is an excellent tool that has made my Windows slavery tolerable. The ability to have a full UNIX command line in Windows with very few bugs makes my life way better.

The one place where I have problems with Cygwin is deployment. The installation program is very clever in that it lets you download a small executable, and then select which modules you want to install, not forcing you to download all the libraries. The problem comes in when you want to reinstall or uninstall a module.

Today I needed to uninstall the Python inside Cygwin, as I was installing the Windows binary version of Python. I went to uninstall Python, and Cygwin tells me there's a dependency from some other module. Fine, I find the module, and I say I want to uninstall that too. I run the uninstall process, and Python is still there!

I try to uninstall Python again, still nothing. Finally on the third try it uninstalls.

I don't know what causes this, but I've had similar problems in the past. It's even worse when you have a really old version of Cygwin, and you try to install a bunch of new libraries. I had to deal with that a few years ago, and that was a nightmare.

It's definitely improved in those few years, but it still has its problems.

At least it's better than Windows Powershell, ug.