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Re: Heads-up: postinstall scripts and PATH (Attn all package maintainers)
- From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please at cygwin dot com>
- To: cygwin-apps at cygwin dot com
- Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 15:04:54 -0500
- Subject: Re: Heads-up: postinstall scripts and PATH (Attn all package maintainers)
- References: <Pine.GSO.4.56.0402241406210.13702@slinky.cs.nyu.edu>
- Reply-to: cygwin-apps at cygwin dot com
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