Batch installation, possibly without setup.exe?

[Larry Hall (Cygwin)]

fergus wrote:
>  > if I want to install a version of Cygwin without user
>  > interaction (optimally just dropping a bunch of files
>  > via unzip), is that feasible?
> 
> I do this frequently in order to have Cygwin on a USB stick. Building it 
> there using setup would take 2 days (even though it's USB2.0). Copying 
> an existing architecture to it takes less than an hour. It works 
> perfectly, scores of times.
> 
> Build your preferred version on a host machine. Then Yes, as long as the 
> zipped package that you are copying from host to target is capable of 
> preserving the +R and +S attributes that will be attached to some of the 
> individual files.
> 
>  > In particular: does setup.exe fiddle with the registry
>  > or other files that can't be just overwritten as a whole?
> 
> Mainly (entirely?) setup sees to (a) location and (b) mounts. The first 
> (a) is attended to by the fact that you are copying a completely 
> specified architecture from host to target. However (b) you do need to 
> remount your installation once it's in place. You could achieve this 
> with a single once-only .bat command tacked on to the un-zipping process.
> 
>  > Obviously, one might want to have PATH adjusted, but apart
>  > from that?
> 
> Why? If your PATH e.g.
> 
>     /home/user/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
> 
> (or whatever) works on the host, why would you want to change it on the 
> target?
> 
> After it's done you might want to fiddle with mkpasswd or mkgroup for 
> individual users on their individual machines, but it's my experience* 
> that you wouldn't actually need to.
> 
> * What Works For Me might not, for You. And I might have misunderstood 
> what you want.

And, as has been pointed out before, using '(win)zip' for this is playing
with fire.  A better recipe was posted by Chris Faylor just a few weeks
ago.  Obviously, anyone is free to use whatever method they want to install
and/or replicate their Cygwin environment.  But the only _supported_ install
procedure is to use 'setup.exe'.

I'm not sure why 'setup.exe' would take significantly longer to install than
a copy when it comes to putting it on a USB drive (never tried it).
Obviously, you'd skip the download part and install from a previously
downloaded local directory of packages (that got created when you installed
Cygwin on the source machine).

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

_____________________________________________________________________

A: Yes.
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