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note on command line installer


Hi Robert, 

you may wondering about you haven't heard anything in the last months after I 
have offered some time working on the command line cygwin installer (for 
example http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2003-11/msg00000.html)
 but there were some personal (at that time one of my sons has an arm 
fracture, which results in a week spend in a hospital and has eaten my 
preserved time for the installer) and other reasons for this. 

I appreciate your work on this installer very much and I'm using this 
installer still for kde-cygwin, but I recognized that with the current code 
base, implemeting a command line installer would costs too much time I don't 
have yet, so I'm not able to work on this now (this may be change in the 
future, but I can't see this at this time), but I like to give some report so 
that others, how may benefit from this work. 

The main problems with the recent code base I see are 

1. the intermixing of gui and core functionality. 
You have written about a minimal way to implement new applications using all 
files in one directory, but this is one of the main problems. If someone 
implements a command line installer, he is only interested on the core stuff 
not the gui stuff. The intermixing makes it very hard to see what is gui and 
what is core, and probably gui and other patches will be applied on wrong 
places, which increases needed bug fixing efforts. 

2. The high abstraction of the api. 
In the last two years I have analysed and patched some of the kde sources and 
I have recognized this as a relative easy task because of the very high 
clearness of this implementation. With the cygwin installer sources sometime 
I felt lost, which makes it very hard to understand, whats going on and where 
to patch. 

Because it seems to be a problem to separate the gui from the core in the 
current implementation, the easiest thing would be to start new from scratch 
by using all usable code and classes from the current implementation with a 
clear design. 

BTW: Currently I'm using a shell based command line setup utility, which 
fullfilles most my my needs. If there are any interests for this  let me 
know. 

Regards 
Ralf 




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