Cygwin installer command line package selection

Adam Dinwoodie adam@dinwoodie.org
Thu Feb 10 14:51:08 GMT 2022


Following on from the report at [0], I've been doing a bit of digging
around a problem I spotted a while ago, and now have a clear bug report.
I'm not sure if it's related to that report, or if the reporter there
was experiencing some other unexpected behaviour.

Simple-ish test case:

1. Get a brand new Windows 11 install.  (I'm using the Microsoft-
   provided Windows 11 Pro Gen2 image in the Azure marketplace, on a
   fresh Azure D2as v5 VM, although I really don't think that's
   significant.)

2. Log in, open Edge, download setup-x86_64.exe from cygwin.com.

3. From PowerShell, cd to the download directory, then run
   `.\setup-86_64.exe -P 2048-cli`.

4. Click through the screens that appear, leave default options selected
   where possible, and select https://mirror.kernel.org as the mirror,
   until you get to the package selector screen.

5. At the package selector screen, since this is a brand new install,
   you should be on the Category view, with nothing expanded.  Expand
   All > Games, and All > Base.  For all the base packages, and the
   2048-cli package under Games, I'd expected the latest non-test
   version to be selected in the "New" column, but instead the "New"
   column is blank for all those packages.  (It shows "Skip", as
   expected, for all the packages I'm not expecting to be installed.)

6. Switch to Pending view.  I'd expected to see a list showing all the
   base packages, plus 2048-cli, as packages pending installation, but
   instead there's just a note saying "Nothing to install or update."

7. Click Next.  The "Review and confirm changes" screen that appears has
   a list of packages to install that looks like what I'd expect based
   on the command line -- a bunch of things that look like they're part
   of base Cygwin, plus 2048-cli -- but clearly doesn't match what was
   displayed on the previous screen.

I'm 90% sure this behaviour changed at some point in the past, and
previously I'd have had the packages to be installed displayed in the
package selector screen as well as the review screen.  I think -- much
less confident here -- that it changed some time around when the
dependency resolution got updated such that setup suggested a variety of
dependency resolutions.  I've not actually tried going back and checking
versions when this behaviour changed, though.

I believe I see this behaviour, or something similar, whenever I try to
install packages using the `-P` interface to setup.exe, and it has been
mildly annoying me for a while, but until now I didn't get as far as
properly characterising the bug or producing a STC.

[0]: https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin/2022-February/250744.html


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