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Re: Setup offers bad directory for Local Package Directory


David Balazic wrote:

> Wouldn't $TEMP/cygwinfiles be a better default than "random" ?

It's really just a difference of expectations.

Wearing my user hat, I find it reasonable that setup offers the default
of CWD for the location to store downloaded files, because my use case
is saving setup.exe to a folder and then clicking on it, and so having
it offer that folder as a default location is reasonable and correct to
me, and not random or unexpected in the least.  I would personally be
quite angry if it defaulted to trying to store anything under %TEMP%
because that is a location for temporary files, not things that should
persist, and I find as user that having a populated local package
directory is extremely handy for updating/installing Cygwin without
needing to download anything -- I do not consider this temporary storage
in any sense.

Wearing my developer hat, you can never win in this situation because no
matter what you do you will always break some users' expectations.  By
definition the choice will seem illogical or incorrect to some portion
of users.  The best you can hope for is to aim for least surprise, and
thus by simply using CWD we remove as much arbitrariness as possible.  I
find it difficult to be persuaded that this should be changed because A)
it only affects the first time you run setup and B) it has been this way
for many years and this is the first time that anyone has reported
finding it odd.  (Of course there could certainly exist reports that
I've not seen.)

> is so complicated that an outsider should download sources and create patch.

For better or worse the only hard currency of the FOSS world is the
patch.

Brian

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