Strange case of missing XWin

[Thomas Wolff]

Andy Koppe wrote:
> 2010/1/14 Fergus:
>    
>> I installed portable Cygwin to a low-capacity USB stick by "picking" Base
>> and then extras from the selection menu. Amongst other things I picked up
>> xterm, Lyx, TeX. (I've done this item-by-item selection a few times in the
>> past but not recently; and never with 1.7.)
>> Somehow I am still missing XWin. So trying to kick things off with the
>> command run XWin -multiwindow is failing.
>>      
>>>> bash: XWin: command not found
>>>>          
>> I could have blinked and done something wrong. But are all the dependencies
>> in place that should be?
>>      
> Yes. X applications do not depend on XWin (i.e. the xorg-server
> package) because they can be used with any X server, including one
> running on a different machine.
>    
True. On the other hand, for someone who *does* want to install a local 
X server, it is not quite obvious what packages to choose from the long 
list in the X11 category.
The Cygwin/X homepage mentions it somewhere (xinit) but many users are 
not likely to consult it before they install cygwin and just wish to add 
X to their setup.
Maybe there should be a package that shows up at the top of the list and 
includes all basic packages and a couple of typical useful tools.
Let me propse a package "X-installer" with the following setup.hint:

# cygwin setup file
sdesc: X server and tools installation (convenience package)
category: X11
requires: xinit xterm font-alias xset xhost xlsfonts xev xprop editres
ldesc: "
The package makes sure a sufficient set of X11 packages is installed.
This comprises the X server, xterm, a collection of useful X tools.
"

I don't know whether a separate setup.hint would work or a dummy package 
would have to be included.

Another note: Given the point above, I wonder why "bash" is listed in 
the dependencies for xterm; xterm can be invoked with any other shell as 
well ;-)
(same for mc).

And maybe xset and xhost should be added to the xinit dependencies too 
because they are frequently called in .xinitrc (like xmodmap and xrdb 
which are listed already).

------
Thomas

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