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Re: Strange case of missing XWin


Andy Koppe wrote:
2010/1/14 Fergus:
I installed portable Cygwin to a low-capacity USB stick by "picking" Base
and then extras from the selection menu. Amongst other things I picked up
xterm, Lyx, TeX. (I've done this item-by-item selection a few times in the
past but not recently; and never with 1.7.)
Somehow I am still missing XWin. So trying to kick things off with the
command run XWin -multiwindow is failing.
bash: XWin: command not found
I could have blinked and done something wrong. But are all the dependencies
in place that should be?
Yes. X applications do not depend on XWin (i.e. the xorg-server
package) because they can be used with any X server, including one
running on a different machine.
True. On the other hand, for someone who *does* want to install a local X server, it is not quite obvious what packages to choose from the long list in the X11 category.
The Cygwin/X homepage mentions it somewhere (xinit) but many users are not likely to consult it before they install cygwin and just wish to add X to their setup.
Maybe there should be a package that shows up at the top of the list and includes all basic packages and a couple of typical useful tools.
Let me propse a package "X-installer" with the following setup.hint:


# cygwin setup file
sdesc: X server and tools installation (convenience package)
category: X11
requires: xinit xterm font-alias xset xhost xlsfonts xev xprop editres
ldesc: "
The package makes sure a sufficient set of X11 packages is installed.
This comprises the X server, xterm, a collection of useful X tools.
"

I don't know whether a separate setup.hint would work or a dummy package would have to be included.

Another note: Given the point above, I wonder why "bash" is listed in the dependencies for xterm; xterm can be invoked with any other shell as well ;-)
(same for mc).


And maybe xset and xhost should be added to the xinit dependencies too because they are frequently called in .xinitrc (like xmodmap and xrdb which are listed already).

------
Thomas

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