Re: Suggestion for Setup.exe: Implement resume feature

[Max Bowsher <maxb1 at ukf dot net>]

Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
> Scott Shell wrote:
>> I am brand new to all things Cygwin so I am writing from the
>> prospective of the complete newbie.  I did read the FAQs and search
>> this newsgroup first though, like a good newbie.
>>
>> Setup.exe lacks a resume feature as far as I can tell.  I was in the
>> process of "Install from Internet" for the first time, downloading
>> many MBs which took over 45 minutes.  I know now to select far fewer
>> packages.  But anyway, something urgent came up and I had to shut down
>> my computer, so I had to click the Cancel button.
>>
>> Later, I ran Setup again and was dismayed when it did not remember
>> where it left off.  It began to download the same files from the
>> beginning.  Taking up about an hour of my time is of course negligible
>> but it is a waste of bandwidth for the mirrors.
>>
>> On the "Choose A Download Site" screen on this second run of Setup I
>> selected a site at random 
> 
> <snip>
> 
> That's your problem.  'setup.exe' keeps track of what you downloaded
> previously by mirror.  Choose a different mirror than last time (and
> more specifically, NOT including the mirror you specified last time -
> you can have up to 4) will cause 'setup.exe' to download all selected
> packages again.

Arguably, this is a silly design. I imagine it's done that way to
separate off custom mirrors from the main distro, and other custom
mirrors, but AFAICS using different directory trees for different
official mirrors is in no way useful.

Here's a possible solution: Add a new field to setup.ini, called
"origin-url" - if present, it overrides the directory name that setup
uses to store the packages locally. Since, in the official distro's
case, there is no downloading allowed directly from cygwin.com, we could
set it to some dummy URL. The result would be a single local collection
of packages that doesn't get ignored when mirror selection is changed.

Max.

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