setup.exe sucks

[Charles Wilson]

Christopher Faylor wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 07, 2004 at 03:37:36PM -0500, Charles Wilson wrote:
>>Perhaps it's time to begin work on a native port of rpm.exe -- but to
>>avoid any "where exactly IS /var/lib/rpm before cygwin is even
>>installed" problems, maybe winrpm.exe should store ALL of its stuff in
>>HKCU somewhere.  /usr/lib/rpm/* and all.
> 
> 
> I don't think you need a native version of rpm any more than you need a
> MS_DOS version of rpm when you're installing linux. 

Point taken.

> You do have to have
> something early on that bootstraps what you need, like setup.exe does
> now, but it could always install the cygwin first before it does
> anything.

Oh, well in that case, maybe a closer look at Dario's unfinished 
RPM-based "distribution".  IIRC, it installed a bootstrap "cygwin" 
(compiled with a different shared mem keyword or something) and an rpm 
linked against that...

RPM installer (was Re: SETUP WIZARD FOR CYGWIN?XFREE86)
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2001-07/msg01429.html

Also, the parent thread has some relevant discussion -- as it jumped 
across different mailing lists.

SETUP WIZARD FOR CYGWIN?XFREE86
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2001-q3/msg00377.html
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-07/msg01355.html
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2001-07/msg00064.html


Proposed RPM Installer Design
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2001-07/msg00074.html

Unfortunately, it seems that the design documenst (and the actual dist 
ISO) is no longer available:
http://www.helixdigital.com/~alcocer/rpm-installer/
gets a 404.

The wayback machine helps, for the design document:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020203174437/http://www.helixdigital.com/~alcocer/rpm-installer/
http://web.archive.org/web/20020204015116/http://www.helixdigital.com/~alcocer/rpm-installer/rpm-installer_1.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20020204020042/http://www.helixdigital.com/~alcocer/rpm-installer/rpm-installer_2.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20020204015647/http://www.helixdigital.com/~alcocer/rpm-installer/rpm-installer_3.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20020204020143/http://www.helixdigital.com/~alcocer/rpm-installer/rpm-installer_4.html

Dario's last message on this subject (24 Jul 2001) includes the 
following paragraph:
"Anyway, at some point I'd like to be able to offer it to the Cygwin
project.  Unfortunately, it's still very immature to be widely
released, which is why I had not suggested or mentioned it before.
Nevertheless, if any of you are interested in playing around with the
installer, I could put a CD-ROM .iso image (~13MB) up on my web site
eventually when the work is done (I hope to have a very rough first
release by the middle of August."
But AFAICT, he never actually put it on the helixdigital site. 
Dario....Oh, Dario....


I understand about the Recommends issue, but somehow I still think that 
separating UI issues (which IMO Recommeds is) from backend, system 
issues (like real dependencies), is a good idea.

If RPM (or dpkg, whatever -- I'm not religious about this) handles all 
the backend stuff well, AND we can deal with the bootstrapping issues, 
then relegating other stuff like Recommendations to the GUI frontend 
seems okay to me.


FWIW, this was interesting (and funny, given the context of the current 
thread):

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2001-11/msg00612.html
"If we're going to go with a two phase setup, then [Dario's] idea makes 
more sense than continuing to roll our own. The big argument against his 
plan was (a) two phase is bad (b) why throw away our perfectly good 
setup tool.  Okay, that's two arguments. ;-)"

--
Chuck