Modular setup?

[Alan Dobkin]

--On Tuesday, February 03, 2004 12:29 PM -0500 Igor Pechtchanski 
<pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, 3 Feb 2004, Alan Dobkin wrote:
>
>> My main goal is to be able to automate Cygwin installations on new
>> machines so someone doesn't have to manually select each package in
>> the GUI. I don't think this can be done with the existing command
>> line options to the GUI, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> Create a custom local mirror where all the packages you want to be
> installed by default are in the "Base" category, and then use setup
> in unattended mode.
> 	Igor

I thought about doing this, especially since I already have my own
local mirror, however it seems like this would entail *way* too much
manual effort to keep it up to date.  New and updated packages are
released on almost daily basis, so I would have to recreate my custom
setup.ini file constantly to reflect the new files in the mirror.  Of
course, I could create a script to do that for me, but then it might
as well just be a script to operate against any (non-custom) mirror,
which is why something like cgf's cygupdate seems like a better answer.

I suppose, alternatively, I could do what you suggested with a static
set of packages in a custom mirror, then run setup in unattended mode
a second time against a standard current mirror.  This should work with
limited maintenance effort, but it requires setup to be run twice for
each installation, which I'd rather avoid by just getting the selected
packages directly from a standard current mirror to begin with.

A third option would be to add another parameter to the setup program
that would allow individual packages (and optionally categories) to be
specified on the command-line or read from a text file.  This would be
ideal, since it would already support all of the features that setup
provides, especially package dependencies, in-use files, and the fact
that it is a self-contained executable (i.e. doesn't require perl or
any cygwin packages to be installed for it to run, unlike cygupdate).
If I find enough time to write patches, this is probably the way to go.

Alan

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