setup installs packages without displaying it

[Gerrit P. Haase]

Brian Dessent wrote:
> "Gerrit P. Haase" wrote:
> 
> 
>>I have selected some packages checked in the partial view which packages
>>are active, then when installation strted several packages were
>>installed which were not selected.  E.g. autoconf, automake related and
>>such.
>>
>>Since I explicitely excluded these form upgrade because I use local
>>patched versions, I'm somewhat shocked now.  It is really a mess.  My
>>local versions got uninstalled.
> 
> 
> Here is what happened.  You selected some package that needed autoconf. 
> Setup saw that you didn't have autoconf installed, so it selected it
> also.


This is not true, this is the machine where I used to build GCC,
Mozilla, MySQL, Perl, all my packages, though it was not updated since
cygwin-1.5.12 (the gold release) because I used it not much this year.


> But, because you were on the "partial" page you did not see that
> autoconf was selected because setup does not update the "view filtering"
> except when switching views.  If you had pressed the View button to
> cycle to "Full" (or even just cycle through them all and back to
> "Partial") you would have seen autoconf selected.

No, I selected the few packages I wanted to install in the Not Installed
or Uptodate view and then toggled to the partial view to check what was
selected as I always did.   So I need to toggle to Partial once, and
then one round through all views back to Partial again?


> 4. Uncheck the "install these dependencies" and dismiss whatever stern
> warnings come at you.

I found the box, could be somewhat bigger ;)


> Yes, it's a pain.  But, you do have to realize that what you are trying
> to do is so NOT what the typical setup user needs.  Typical setup users
> want stuff to work and don't want to know about dependencies et cetera,
> so the more that we can have setup take care of that automatically the
> better.
> 
> On a fundamental level, the way you are trying to do this is wrong.  I
> think if you did the same thing -- replace files "owned" by the package
> manager -- with any other linux distro (e.g. apt or rpm), you would get
> burned as well.

Well, I knew that this argument will come up.  However, e.g. my libtool
package includes one or two changes I apply locally, so I take the
latest release, patch it and I'm finished, it is the fastest way to
do so.

> This is how I suggest you do it:
> 
> 1. Uninstall the packaged version.
> 2. Build/Install local version into --prefix=/usr/local, never /usr.
> 3. Create a dummy package with version 99.999 or something so that setup
> will always think that what you have installed is newer than anything
> available.  I think this could be as simple as just editing
> /etc/setup/installed.db to contain a line such as "autoconf
> autoconf-99.999-1.tar.bz2 0", without actually creating a package.

This is an intresting hint, thanks.


Gerrit