Re: Manual installation of cygport packages

[Andrew Schulman <schulman dot andrew at epa dot gov>]

> Andrew Schulman writes:
> >> On 3/15/2017 6:37 AM, Rui Pedro Caldeira wrote:
> >> > Hello all, I'm new to this and I successfully build a package with
> >> > cygport. My problem is that, I would like to install it in order to
> >> > test if the package was successfully built. Is there anyway to do
> >> > that?
> >> 
> >> https://cygwin.com/package-server.html
> >
> > I usually take the simpler approach of just unpacking the package archive
> > into the root filesystem:
> >
> > tar -C/ -Jxf $package-$version.tar.xz
> >
> > This doesn't run pre-remove or post-install scripts, but it puts the files
> > in place so you can test them.
> 
> You should also generate the compressed packges listing in /etc/setup
> and an entry into the installed.db file or you will be unable to
> properly un-install the package later on.  The only time I'm using this
> manual installation is when I quickly need to test an update on an
> already installed package that I will later re-install properly via the
> local package repository.  Of course if these need postinstall actions
> you also need to run those, so this quickly gets more complicated than
> having setup do its thing.

Maybe. But for most packages that I unpack this way to test, (1) the
package is already installed or I'm going to adopt it anyway, so I'll end
up installing it properly using setup, which will take care of other setup
like installed.db; and (2) the preremove and postinstall scripts either do
nothing or do only trivial things like updating config files.

So for most cases, it works just fine just to unpack the archive into the
root file system in order to test it.


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