This is the mail archive of the cygwin mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: Complaining after fair notice of dropping XP support. Was: Not very nice at all.


On Nov 10 02:45, Brian Inglis wrote:
> On 2016-11-10 00:24, Fergus wrote:
> > > > 1. Use the following version of setup*.exe:
> > > > 32-bit:
> > ftp://www.fruitbat.org/pub/cygwin/setup/snapshots/setup-x86-2.874.exe
> > > > 2. Run setup*.exe with the -X option, using the following
> > > > mirror:
> > > > 32-bit:
> > > > ftp://www.fruitbat.org/pub/cygwin/circa/2016/08/30/104223
> > Q1	Any ideas of what might be de-railing this simple operation?
> 
> See notice on throttling Cygwin Time Machine because of abuse:
> http://www.fruitbat.org/Cygwin/timemachine.html
> advises using only setup on as few required packages as possible
> at a time, until abuse stops.
> 
> > Q2	[... virtual(?);] Could one instead use wget on
> > ftp://www.fruitbat.org/pub/cygwin/circa/2016/08/30/104223?
> 
> Wget honours robots.txt, and LIST has been disabled for Cygwin
> Time Machine directories, so you can not even see the
> directories, and no FTP download requests other than GET will
> work.
> 
> https://www.google.ca/search?q=lack+of+planning+on+your+part+does+not+constitute+an+emergency&site=imghp&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X
> 
> Please remember that both the Cygwin and Time Machine
> projects are volunteer efforts with few resources.
> Each must manage their projects as best they can fit effort
> into their time, and may withdraw their efforts and
> facilities at any time.
> 
> Following the mailing lists/groups and participation earlier
> could perhaps have delayed the final implementation to allow
> more time for people to plan and execute final downloads.
> 
> Complaining after advance notice was given publicly and making
> could/should have suggestions after the fact is pointless, and
> could demotivate the volunteers to drop the projects, make
> access private, or charge for it.
> 
> Fairly recently, the owner of gmane.org, that many of us had
> used to browse and post to mailing lists via the web, shut
> down his web site, although he kept his mail-news gateway up.
> How many people over the years expressed appreciation for his
> free service to the community? Or were gracious when letting
> him know his site had a problem. And thanked him when it was
> fixed. Not enough probably!
> 
> If you, a bunch of Cygwin XP dependents banded together, or
> your company  have the space, bandwidth, server(s), money to
> provide a public mirror of the final Cygwin XP release from
> the Time Machine, you could contact the owner and make a
> proposal to offload his site, or upgrade his facilities and
> help run them.
> Or your company could ask MS and Redhat for XP and Cygwin XP
> support quotes if it has the money ;^>

https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2016-11/msg00068.html

Red Hat does not provide Cygwin Support any longer since we hadn't
enough support customers to get the revenue supporting the business
model.  Apparently too many people were happy with upstream as is.

As Stephen wrote, Cygwin is a volunteer driven project now.  One of the
reasons we relaxed the license was to make the project easier accessible
and maybe get more volunteers fixing bugs and stuff.  But then again,
Cygwin isn't Linux so it's not as sexy by far.

> There's an opportunity for some of you XP folks to make
> money off the others by providing dedicated repos of
> outdated software with support ;^>
> 
> If you are working for a company that decided to build products
> for XP dependent on Cygwin, maybe it's time to tell them that
> Cygwin has reached EOL on the EOL XP.
> If you are supporting Cygwin based products on XP, maybe it's
> time to tell your customers you can't any longer, as both are
> unsupported.
> 
> You can download source and binary packages that you need that
> predate 2.6 from the Cygwin mirrors, and include all the build
> dependencies, starting with cygport.
> That will enable you to use setup to download from the Time
> Machine only those packages recently updated on Cygwin
> mirrors to use 2.6.
> You could run setup unattended installing packages one at a
> time, in a loop driven by the packages needed from
> installed.db, to honour the site owner's request.
> You will then be in a position to monitor upstream sources,
> so you can download new upstream patches and releases as
> they become available, so you have and can apply them when
> needed, to rebuild the updated packages.
> 
> You could also try upgrading to W10 and working with single
> user Ubuntu under WSL ;^>

Interesting point, but where's the fun in that from a dev perspective :)


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]