Re: RFC: [ITP] Installation Profiles packages

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 01:52:20PM -0500, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
>As the latest installment in the recent series of major "D'oh!"s, I
>realized that the installation profiles I previously proposed for setup
>could be initially implemented as special packages with the right
>dependences.  This still doesn't absolve us from adding some more
>sophisticated support for these in setup (e.g., communicating the user
>prerefence about creating desktop icons to them), but it's a start, and
>it'll cut down on the "I installed Cygwin, so how come gcc doesn't work"
>(and the much more annoying "just install everything, it's only 2 gigs"
>answers to those).
>
>IMO, these packages should be in a special new category (I propose the
>name "@Profiles" to make setup put this at the top, but I don't know if
>setup will parse this correctly).  I've attached a few sample profile
>packages for commonly requested configurations with the corresponding
>setup.hints.  We could probably concentrate them all in one directory
>(thus the '@ ...' lines at the top of the hint files).  All the .tar.bz2
>files are the same empty tarball -- it's the setup.hints that are
>important.
>
>Comments and other suggestions welcome.  Note that the attached packages
>are an initial cut at defining those profiles -- I'm bound to have missed
>something.  Also, I'm not proposing to maintain *all* of the profiles,
>though I could maintain the ones I've attached, as there isn't too much
>work involved.

Assuming that Corinna agrees, I'm willing to put these in a directory in
release.

I'd like to get some consensus on the name "Profiles", though.  Is that
adequately intuitive?

cgf