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Re: setup.exe sucks


Warren Young wrote:

> Brian Dessent wrote:
> 
> > The Cygwin DLL cannot be dynamically loaded AFAIK so that won't work.
> 
> "cannot" is an overstrong word, I think.

I don't see it as being a subjective thing.  It either is possible or
it's not -- and at the current point in time it is not possible.  I
understand your point that if someone with sufficient motivation,
knowledge, and time (and a Red Hat copyright assignment on file) were to
tackle the problem it would be theoretically possible to have this
feature.  But this does not appear to be happening any time soon so I
see nothing wrong with "cannot".

> Yes, I thought of that, but it doesn't take into account things like
> shell windows still running when you try to do an upgrade.
> 
> Clearly stopping services is the most important thing, because there is
> no visual representation of them.  One can't look at one's screen and
> realize that there are users of cygwin.dll, like one can with a terminal
> window.  But if one stone can get two birds...

Honestly, I think a clear and concise user interface should be the first
priority of any setup development work.  The "butt-wiping and diaper
changing" of users who are told they must either stop running services
or else reboot after running setup seems very much a secondary concern. 
The BSDs and Linuxes have it easy because their filesystems can unlink
files in use so it's rather trivial to replace libraries and then
killhup whatever was using them.  But under windows it seems like much
more heroic measures would be required to work around an upgrade, so the
"make the user clean his own mess" copout seems somewhat more justified.

Brian


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