Base packages appear to be missing from fresh setup install

[cygwin.5.u830@neverbox.com]

Base packages appear to be missing from fresh setup install

The problem in short:

I run setup and download everything onto a removable hard disk; 
I move the disk to a computer without network for a clean install;
I run setup from local directory, using default choices;
OUTCOME: nothing gets installed
EXPECTED OUTCOME: the base stuff would get installed
APPARENT REASON: the "base" category is missing from what I downloaded
OTHER THINGS I TRIED: re-downloading everything from other mirrors too
QUESTION: is there a known problem with the distribution sites?



Further details:

OUTCOME: the cygwin directory gets created, and in it the usual bunch of 
other dirs such as bin, etc, lib, tmp and so on; but /bin is empty and so 
are most others; the only files found in the whole tree are logs such as 
those in /etc/setup. Setup finishes by saying "nothing needed to be 
installed".

APPARENT REASON: when I run setup.exe, at the "Select packages" stage there 
is no Base category. There's
  All
    Accessibility
    Admin
    Archive
    Audio
    Database
    Devel
    Docs
    ...
so it's no surprise that the base stuff doesn't get installed.

OTHER THINGs I TRIED: I had an older "setup directory with all possible 
files" from a few months back, when I did that exercise for another 
computer; I checked the sizes: the old one was 911 MB with 834 directories 
and the new one only 608 MB with 710 directories. This suggested that some 
things might be missing from my latest download. Indeed, if I do setup from 
local dir using the old bunch of files, the list does contain a base 
category. So I tried re-downloading the lot from other mirrors. Got exactly 
the same number of files and directories from all three 
(ftp.inf.tu-dresden.de, ftp.uni-kl.de, www.mirrorservice.org).

QUESTIONS:

Is anyone else experiencing the problem? IE you download a full set and 
notice it's incomplete and won't install?

If three mirrors all serve a download set that doesn't work, is the problem 
possibly at the root distribution site?

Would it be possible for the cygwin team to publish the list of packages of 
the full distribution on their web site, so that one could check whether 
what one is getting contains everything that it should? (And possibly setup 
could perform such an integrity-check-of-the-set automatically at some 
point in the future.)

Thanks for any advice

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/