This is the mail archive of the
cygwin-apps@cygwin.com
mailing list for the Cygwin project.
Non-intuitive setup.exe behavior -- downloading is affected by what's installed?
- From: Jonathan Kamens <jik at curl dot com>
- To: cygwin-apps at cygwin dot com
- Date: 17 Nov 2001 21:56:05 -0500
- Subject: Non-intuitive setup.exe behavior -- downloading is affected by what's installed?
I keep a full mirror of all the current Cygwin packages locally, even
though we don't actually install all of them locally on our machines.
In the past, I have done that simply by running setup.exe and telling
it to download into my local mirror directory -- it would tell me
which old packages have been updated or new packages have been created
and need to be downloaded.
However, when the new version of setup.exe is downloading into a local
directory, it apparently by default skips packages that are not
already installed on the local machine. For example, when I ran it
tonight, it decided to skip indent, since of course I don't have
indent installed locally since I've never installed it before.
Similarly, it's telling me that it's skipping the download of "cvs"
since I don't have it installed.
I understand that in the new setup.exe, some packages aren't installed
by default. However, it seems to me that when downloading into a
local directory, the deciding factor when determining whether to
download a package should be whether it has been downloaded in the
past, i.e., whether there is a version fo that package in the
directory into which downloading should take place. I'm not sure what
the default should be for a newly created package, but I personally
would prefer for the default to be to download such packages.
Of course, I can work around this problem -- I'll just use wget or
mirror to mirror the whole tree from one of the Cygwin mirrors instead
of downloading it with setup.exe. But I just wanted to comment that
the current behavior of setup.exe doesn't seem fully intuitive.
Note, however, that it's obvious that a lot of work has gone into the
new interface and functionality, and overall, I like it a lot.
Thanks!
Jonathan Kamens