how to automatically install all local packages

[Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes]

On Wed, May 18, 2005 at 03:04:34PM +0100, Max Bowsher wrote:
> Tod Courtney wrote:
> >>I appreciate both of your helpful replies.  I guessed there would be ways
> >>to 'trick' the setup using configuration files and looked a little bit, 
> >>but
> >>hadn't figured out how to do it.  I understand both of your answers and
> >>will consider them if my patch (see next) takes some time to be accepted.
> >>
> >>I did determine how to change the setup code in order to set the initial
> >>installation mode to 'install' instead of 'default'.  Once I found the
> >>place, it turned out to be a very small change.  Basically I added a new
> >>command line option '-I, --install' that installs all available patches,
> >>rather than only installing the 'default' patches.
> >>
> >>The patch is included below.  This patch is relative to the HEAD version,
> >>but the same patch can be applied to the current release code without any
> >>changes.  From what I could tell, posting the patch to this list is the
> >>appropriate first step to its possible inclusion in the code.  I hope the
> >>patch can be included, as it will be very helpful to me and my user base,
> >>and seems to have a very small probability of introducing problems.
> >>
> >>If there is a better way to submit this patch, please let me know.
> 
> The patch submission is fine.
> 
> However, I disagree with the concept of the patch.
> 
> In the general case, an 'install all' feature will be almost never useful, 
> since the Cygwin distribution contains so many packages that it is almost 
> impossible to want to use every one.

I have to disagree with this disagreement.  Having to muck about editing
setup.ini shouldn't be necessary.  Installing all downloaded packages
from a local directory should be easy.
 
> Furthermore, although setup doesn't explicitly implement it (yet) it is 
> possible for packages to conflict with others - we even have a pair of 
> packages for which this is the case: only one of tetex-tiny and tetex-base 
> should ever be installed at a time.

Is that documented?  I don't use tetex, but have both installed :)

How would a package that requires a tetex installation list it's
requirement?  I see several packages that require tetex-tiny.
 
package tetex's ldesc seems to contradict you:
   This is teTeX, a TeX distribution for UNIX compatible systems.  This
   virtual tetex package will install tetex-bin and tetex-tiny, the
   minimal working teTeX setup.  It is advised to install tetex-base too.

> As I understand it, your use case is that you need a set of packages to 
> default to "Install". Since you already need to produce a custom setup.ini, 
> it should be very easy for you to ensure that each of your packages in in 
> either the "Base" or "Misc" category, which will cause setup to behave as 
> you want, right now, without a patch. Is there a reason why this technique 
> is not more useful than a command line option?

AFAIK, the only need for a custom setup.ini is to change the category.
You ideally should be able to do a "Download Without Installing" of
selected packages and just save the Local Package Directory to cd with
the full setup.ini as is, and then run setup in a mode to install
everything available.