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

[Andy Koppe]

On 26 May 2011 13:09, Andy Koppe wrote:
> On 26 May 2011 12:51, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>> On a closely related note, there's the issue of the mintty postinstall
>>> script. Simply dropping the "mintty" shortcut creation when setup.exe
>>> is changed would mean that the shortcut would disappear without
>>> replacement for people updating with a not-quite-up-to-date setup.exe
>>> or who habitually untick the "Add start menu item" checkbox.
>>>
>>> Therefore I think I should change the postinstall script such that it
>>> continues to create the "mintty" shortcut, but only if "Cygwin
>>> Terminal" isn't there. However, since setup.exe creates its shortcuts
>>> *after* running the postinstall script, people would end up with both
>>> "mintty" and "Cygwin Terminal" until the mintty package is next
>>> updated. Avoiding that requires setup.exe to nuke the "mintty"
>>> shortcut when it creates "Cygwin Terminal".
>>
>> Hmm.
>>
>> That begs for the question why the start menu entry isn't managed
>> entirely by mintty's postinstall/preremove scripts.  In theory we can
>> reduce setup to ask for the desktop icon.  The start menu entry is
>> always created, and it's always created by mintty.  That would make the
>> entire affair much easier, isn't it?
>
> Good point. The only argument against that I can think of is that the
> postinstall script shortcut is non-optional. There have been some
> minor complaints about that before.

Another point worth noting here is that the mintty postinstall script
requires mkshortcut, hence cygutils will be pulled into the default
installation. I think that's a good idea anyway though, not least
because a standard answer to "[Random native console program] doesn't
work in mintty" is "Run it through cygstart".

Andy