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Re: Heads-up: postinstall scripts and PATH (Attn all package maintainers)


On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 03:00:11PM -0500, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
>Someone was installing Cygwin from scratch on a clean system, and they
>had a problem running the postinstall scripts.  On further
>investigation, it turned out that most of the scripts assume "/bin" is
>going to be in the PATH, and that it's going to precede any other
>directories (even the script that's supposed to create /etc/profile!).
>
>IMO, postinstall scripts should assume that PATH is *unset*, and all
>executables should be explicitly specified.

Wow.  I can't believe I fell into this trap.  I have been writing shell
scripts for a long long time and should know better.

Thanks for the heads up.  I suspect that this accounts for some strange
installation problems.

Would it be worthwhile to just have setup.exe put /bin first in the path
when running these things?  I know that the absolutely correct solution
is to use absolute path names in these scripts but people are going
to forget, so...

cgf


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