Re: Download Cygwin once and intall it several times

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 05:53:59PM -0400, Ralph Hempel wrote:
> Christopher Faylor wrote:
>
>> For the time being, you should be able to dump the mount table to a .bat
>> file with "mount -m" and then run the .bat on the system that has the
>> copied installation.
>> This technique probably won't work in Cygwin 1.7.x when it is released,
>> though.
>
> Funny enough, this is the kind of problem that is solved by being able
> to run the Cygwin setup from the command line.
>
> On my own system, I keep a downloaded repository in a special folder that 
> is shared read-only with other computers on the network.
>
> When I want to roll out my standard Cygwin install on other machines,
> which may be vmWare machines or other developer's machines, I just
> give them my specially patched setup.exe that accepts package names
> and a batch file that runs setup and requests the packages needed for
> a clean install plus a few extra packages.
>
> Run the batch file, and presto, each developer has the same basic set of
> packages without monkeying around with the GUI.

Or you could just copy the contents of c:\cygwin and use "mount -m" as I
mentioned.  The only thing this doesn't do is duplicate service entries
but that doesn't happen when you use setup.exe either.

I guess it's possible that running setup to do a full install might take
less time than a copy of c:\cygwin but I'll bet it takes longer to
run setup.exe and run all of the postinstall scripts than it does
to just copy c:\cygwin over the network.

Using setup.exe for this task makes me think that people believe
setup.exe is doing something mysterious.  It really isn't.  Even if you
wanted to go to the effort of unpacking tar.bz2 files you could still do
it all with bash, tar, and mount, avoiding setup.exe entirely.

cgf

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