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Re: Providing/Packaging a Postinstalled SUSV4 Doc only Package a la Debian


On 10/03/17 20:24, Achim Gratz wrote:
Corinna Vinschen writes:
Otherwise, I am nervous about setting a precedent for a package that could
give different contents each time it is installed (yes, Microsoft, I'm
looking at you too). And there are plenty of corner cases where this
wouldn't work: offline installs, web proxies, or if the account performing
the Cygwin install (e.g. Administrator) was blocked from accessing the web
(on security grounds).
This is another interesting point of course.  Does wget or curl allow
to specify a (short) timeout before giving up and just not installing
anything, perhaps?

Yes. 'wget' has --timeout=<seconds>. You can also set --dns-timeout, --connect-timeout and --read-timeout for fine-grain control [1]. However, the defaults are sensible and it gives up fairly quickly if there's no network.

'curl' has --max-time and --connect-timeout [2].

Regardless if that is possible (I think it is), I would not accept such
a package into the standard distribution.  For one, setup is not really
equipped to handle such packages properly.  Two, I really can't allow
anything to download something from outside the internal network during
the installation even where it might work.

I agree completely. I maintain what is effectively a private corporate Cygwin Time Machine, so the company I work for can recreate installations. Having this kind of repeatability is important to some people. In one sense I can't get too excited - it's just a documentation package afterall - I'm just nervous that it sets a precedent. What's next? Similar packages for non-free fonts? How about a package that downloads the 'lame' source, builds it and installs it, all from a post-install script? These might sound a bit extreme, but you get my point.

Dave.

[1] - https://linux.die.net/man/1/wget
[2] - https://linux.die.net/man/1/curl


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