Cygwin Statistics and curiosity

[E. Madison Bray]

On Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 21:31 Achim Gratz <Stromeko@nexgo.de wrote:

> E. Madison Bray writes:
> > I have often wondered why apt-cyg [1] hasn't been adopted fully by
> > Cygwin as one of the default packages (in fact I'm not sure if there
> > even is an actual cygwin package for apt-cyg), aside from the fact
> > that it's not formally maintained as part of the cygwin ecosystem.
> > Maybe it should be.
>
> For starters, apt-cyg and the handful of purported alternatives will
> break your installation in subtle and not-so subtle ways.  None of them
> handle all postinstall actions correctly and all of them will fall over
> if locked in-use files have to be altered or replaced.
>

I'm sure it has bugs, though it's always worked quite well for me. If I
have experienced those bugs I'm not sure. I think it's possible but I'm
also expert enough to usually resolve issues I've encountered on my own. At
the most, I think I've had to occasionally run rebaseall after some package
installs.

I didn't realize its development history was such a hideous mess,
especially considering that it's just a few hundred lines of bash script
that I could probably rewrite myself. Personally I'd be happy to maintain
it, especially if it were installed with Cygwin. Otherwise I'd just be
maintaining yet another "unofficial" fork of it.

Personally, I don't think a GUI program should be the only interface for
installing new packages into cygwin*

* modulo caveats such as using it to upgrade cygwin1.dll itself

>

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