Re: "local install"?

["Robert Collins" <robert.collins@itdomain.com.au>]

Sorry about the length, just wanted to be really clear...
===
----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Wilson" <cwilson@ece.gatech.edu>

> Basically, the reason we've been harping that "setup is not a
mirroring
> tool" is to preserve the freedom to change setup's on-disk database
and
> operational behavior in order to support setup's *primary* goal.  If
you
> want a local copy of the tarballs that looks just like
> ftp://mirrors.rcn.net/ -- setup may no longer do that for you -- or
the
> way it does it may be different than you expect (e.g. the "extra"
> 'http%%%site%path' directory level)

The reason *I've* been harping about setup != mirror tool is that mirror
tools have a *heap* of functionality that setup doesn't, and in my
opinion should not have in the
download-and-bootstrap-and-maintain-cygwin GUI.

I.e.: regexp filters on packages to get, grabbing source as well as
binaries, grabbing all versions available at once, grabbing on a
schedule, and probably more.

Setup's goal is quite simple: Install and update a cygwin net
distribution in a non-confusing manner that is satisfactory to the
broadest possible group of cygwin users, in a reliable fashion.

To this end we have things like:
* Categories (too many packages)
* dependencies (foo does not work without bar)
* a local cache dir (Why does it always download X - I simply want to
reinstall)
* in-place file replacement (I upgraded ssh, but it had an error on
sshd.exe, and now sshd won't start)
* Default to a bare minimum installed (I've a low bandwidth
connection..)

I will very happily change the local dir structure irrespective of folk
using setup as a mirroring tool or not - keeping forward compatability
(but not backwards) is easy.

What I won't do is accept "Setup won't let me automagically grab all the
source tarballs shown in the GUI" as a bug report. Likewise "Setup
defaults to not installing gcc" is not IMO a valid bug report, because
it's easy to merge in a setup.ini to add packages to Base or Misc, but
it's much harder to stop packages auto-installing if they are in base or
misc.

So in short, anyone who wants to use setup to maintain a local cache to
install from *should do this*. But don't expect it to be useable as a
run-at-midnight tool to automatically update said cache.

I will happily support endeavours to create such a tool, that leverages
the setup.exe code base and lives in cinstall.

Rob


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