Re: Providing/Packaging a Postinstalled SUSV4 Doc only Package a la Debian

[David Stacey <drstacey@tiscali.co.uk>]

On 10/03/17 20:24, Achim Gratz wrote:
> Corinna Vinschen writes:
>>> Otherwise, I am nervous about setting a precedent for a package that could
>>> give different contents each time it is installed (yes, Microsoft, I'm
>>> looking at you too). And there are plenty of corner cases where this
>>> wouldn't work: offline installs, web proxies, or if the account performing
>>> the Cygwin install (e.g. Administrator) was blocked from accessing the web
>>> (on security grounds).
>> This is another interesting point of course.  Does wget or curl allow
>> to specify a (short) timeout before giving up and just not installing
>> anything, perhaps?

Yes. 'wget' has --timeout=<seconds>. You can also set --dns-timeout, 
--connect-timeout and --read-timeout for fine-grain control [1]. 
However, the defaults are sensible and it gives up fairly quickly if 
there's no network.

'curl' has --max-time and --connect-timeout [2].

> Regardless if that is possible (I think it is), I would not accept such
> a package into the standard distribution.  For one, setup is not really
> equipped to handle such packages properly.  Two, I really can't allow
> anything to download something from outside the internal network during
> the installation even where it might work.

I agree completely. I maintain what is effectively a private corporate 
Cygwin Time Machine, so the company I work for can recreate 
installations. Having this kind of repeatability is important to some 
people. In one sense I can't get too excited - it's just a documentation 
package afterall - I'm just nervous that it sets a precedent. What's 
next? Similar packages for non-free fonts? How about a package that 
downloads the 'lame' source, builds it and installs it, all from a 
post-install script? These might sound a bit extreme, but you get my point.

Dave.

[1] - https://linux.die.net/man/1/wget
[2] - https://linux.die.net/man/1/curl