Cygwin installer could be much more better
Ilja Umov
ilja.umov@gmail.com
Wed Jan 29 04:26:00 GMT 2014
Hi,
there is a certainly a good historical reason why cygwin installer
has so many options. But now one-click installers are so common
(Google Chrome is the best example), it may look rather scary,
especially for beginners.
I did browse a bit though cygwin source code and well, I'm not so
great at C++, that I could help in any meaningful way.
Though I did make a script that downloads and extract list of cygwin
packages (Python>=3.3, because of `.xz` files):
https://github.com/iljau/cyg_fetcher/blob/master/fetch_package_list.py
Didn't quite get to installation part, yet.
Based on my cygwin usage (installing and updating it on multiple
machines) and during process of writing above script I discovered
following:
1) Usually I want to "Install from Internet"
2) Usually "C:\cygwin" is where I want to install it for "All Users".
3) "Local Package Directory" could be just environment variable
%TMP% or %TEMP%. (Still don't understand difference)
4) Usually "Direct connection" is good.
5) The most reliable mirror is (and the only one that supports https):
https://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin/
6) Usually I dont want to "Create Icons", especially after update.
So there are multiple possibilities to provide reasonable defaults
and spare users from confusion.
That's probably why MSYS2 is being developed:
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Preparation/Windows/MSYS2
Thank you for your attention.
--
Ilja Umov
https://iljau.me
--
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
More information about the Cygwin
mailing list