setup and mintty (was Re: New setup.exe release?)

[Christopher Faylor]

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 08:21:20PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>On May 23 13:25, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 06:04:37PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>> >On May 23 11:33, Charles Wilson wrote:
>> >> as-is.  What if you really WANT to use cmdbox?  How else can a
>> >> cygwin-shell-in-cmdbox be started, other than a .bat file of some kind?
>> >>  And since that's the only real way to do so, we ought to provide the file.
>> >                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>> >                    Huh?
>> >
>> >You can simple create a Windows shortcut to bash.exe, edit it to
>> >add a --login option, and that's all you really need.
>> 
>> I agree, except for people who "need" to set the CYGWIN environment
>> variable for some reason.  You have to do that before running bash.
>> 
>> Maybe we should be looking into introducing a way to set the CYGWIN
>> environment variable in the global environment and adding c:\cygwin\bin
>> (or whatever) to the global PATH as well.
>
>I would really like to avoid that.  The question is, which CYGWIN
>settings are really needed before an application starts?  Apart from the
>"debugging the Cygwin DLL" scenario, the only one I can think of is the
>"tty" setting, and that's about to go away.
>
>IMHO it would be quite helpful if a setenv ("CYGWIN", ...) or putenv
>("CYGWIN=...") would change the CYGWIN settings for the calling process
>as well.

Well, unless you make that change, all of the other Cygwin environment
variables (not just "tty") need to be set before the first Cygwin
process in a tree is started.  Parsing the CYGWIN environment variable
on the fly is trivial but I don't know for sure if there are some
settings which only work right when set during program initialization.

cgf