Re: setup.exe and release messages

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

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 09:13:31PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>Hi,
>
>
>It just occured to me what would be an IMHO really cool extension to
>setup.exe.
>
>What if we could put some simple text file on cygwin.com called, say,
>setup.rel, and setup.exe would try to fetch this file and, before
>presenting the chooser dialog, open another dialog with a scrollable
>text field containing the text from this release message file?  Then
>setup.exe would store a hash of the text.
>
>Later invocations of setup would only show the file content if the hash
>value of the text differs from the stored hash value, which obviously
>means the file has changed.
>
>This would allow us to generate arbitrary release messages for important
>stuff.  Just to give people an idea that there's some major change, for
>instance, the jump from Cygwin 1.5.25 to 1.7.1
>
>Or consider we have to rework some functionality in Cygwin 1.7 which
>turns out to require some user intervention, for instance a
>configuration change. 
>
>This would not only give us a chance to deliver release messages, it
>would also give people a chance to stop if they don't feel comfortable
>with the described changes.  Well, if they read the message at all, that
>is.
>
>What do others think of that idea?
>
>And who volunteers to implement it?

I've been thinking about adding some way of reviewing documentation from
setup.exe, just like every other installer in the world.  But, that's not
quite what you're talking about.  I think you want to display something
before the user makes a decision.

We could add this to the setup.ini file and make it per-package so that
caveats or announcements show up on the next screen after the packages
are selected.

The other thing I've always thought about is adding a way to display
the cygwin-announce messages in setup.exe so that people could know
the reason for a change.

cgf