Re: setup

[Warren Young <wyml@etr-usa.com>]

On Aug 10, 2015, at 11:00 AM, Achim Gratz wrote:
> 
> Warren Young writes:
>> Isn’t the whole point of this discussion that setup.exe already knows
>> all the tricks it needs to in order to do what we want here, except
>> for the “replace setup.exe in place” issue I’ve brought up separately?
> 
> Well, setup.exe today has a lot of probably bitrotted features that
> Cygwin never used (even if some of it looks quite interesting and
> useful)

I don’t think there is any call for setup.exe to be highly backwards-compatible.  It isn’t asked to deal with old package repos, very old versions of setup.ini, etc.  Therefore, I would say that whoever is in charge of this code base should simply get rid of the bitrotted features.  

If any of these obsolete features are needed again in the future, they can be pulled out of the SCM history.

> there are other things it doesn't do even though it should
> probably be doing it.

Okay, but...

>> Why do you need a self-contained POSIX environment to replace
>> setup.exe?
> 
> At the moment I'm just thinking whether that might be a more sustainable
> way forward.

Replacing core infrastructure like this almost never works out smoothly, and usually fails outright.  It’s far better to remediate the code base in-place, if at all possible.

There have been a bunch of attempts in the past at replacing setup.exe. At least 3, that I can think of.  All have fizzled.