Those nasty bundled Cygwin's

[Larry Hall (Cygwin)]

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
>> Øyvind Harboe wrote:
>>> One of the reasons that companies distribute Cygwin (often breaching
>>> the GPL by not including the source) is that Cygwin setup sucks(I do
>>> believe that there is a consensus that Cygwin setup sucks).
>>>
>>> If the Cygwin install process rocked (e.g. like Debian there was some
>>> known stable/unstable/testing collections, zero questions install,
>>> automatic mirrors, able to take adavantage of fat internet
>>> connections, etc.), I think this would remove a lot of the reasons
>>> for distributing Cygwin with a product(which seems fine at first, but
>>> creates subtle and hard to solve compatibilty problems).
>>>
>>> So how about adding a link to Cygwin front page saying something to
>>> the effect that "we're looking for sponsors to fix setup and this is
>>> what we plan to do"?
>>>
>>> Or has this already been done? :-)
>>>
>>
>> Actually, I think the only thing that "setup.exe" doesn't currently
>> have some capability for is the ability to set priorities on certain
>> mirrors based on "some criteria".  What that criteria should be has
> 
> It also completely lacks a "uninstall all of CygWin, I'm not kidding" 
> option, or a graceful way to record a setup in vivo, so that the setup 
> of one machine can be easily duplicated to another. The way the download 
> sites are listed only by hostname, instead of by complete URL, is also 
> confusing. It means that if you want to include a mirror manually, you 
> have to guess or deduce the rest of the URL to use.
> 
> I could go on, but you get the point. Eric Raymond's famous rant about 
> setting up CUPS, and the problems with other open source GUI's, 
> addresses some of these kinds of issues at 
> http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html.


As is obvious from past threads, there is no lack of ideas of ways to
improve "setup.exe"...

-- 
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
216 Dalton Rd.                          (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746

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