How portable (relocatable) is a Cygwin installation?

How portable (relocatable) is a Cygwin installation?

[Andy Li]

Hi,

We are looking for an easy way to distribute an OCaml development
enviroment based on Cygwin. Someone has an idea of installing all the
necessary packages and zip the whole Cygwin installation directory and
distribute the resulting archive.

Is it a good idea? Is the installation path written in a Cygwin
installation somewhere that may need to be updated when relocating? Is
there any registry entry or env var required for a Cygwin installation to
work?

Best regards,
Andy

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Re: How portable (relocatable) is a Cygwin installation?

[Brian Inglis]

On 2018-05-09 18:08, Andy Li wrote:
> We are looking for an easy way to distribute an OCaml development
> enviroment based on Cygwin. Someone has an idea of installing all the
> necessary packages and zip the whole Cygwin installation directory and
> distribute the resulting archive.
> Is it a good idea? Is the installation path written in a Cygwin
> installation somewhere that may need to be updated when relocating? Is
> there any registry entry or env var required for a Cygwin installation to
> work?

Others use that approach, which generates many posts asking about find_fast_cwd
warnings, due to lack of Cygwin updates and Windows update incompatibilities.
No. Yes. Yes.
How good is your organization's Windows app packaging, distribution, deployment,
and installation system e.g. SCCM infrastructure?

Rather than deal with possible existing Cygwin installs, internal details which
may change, initial install actions, package postinstall script effects, and dll
rebasing, it may be better to distribute a zip, or use a network share or web
server, to provide a local package archive with the
{noarch,x86{,_64}}/release/<package>/ directories and contents including setup
exe, ini, distributed .tar.xz packages, and install on each system using Cygwin
setup from that location, instead of an official network mirror.
The install could be a scripted unattended setup run: check what the web docs
say about using local archives, and unattended setup.
You could standardize on Cygwin root e.g. C:\cygwin{32,64}\ and local package
archive location of C:\cygwin{32,64}\var\cache\setup\, or a network share or web
server equivalent of the latter.
Updated copies of the setup exe, ini, packages, and all dependencies can be
added to that local archive to allow synchronized updates using Cygwin setup.
You will have to track and save all Cygwin updates, and decide when you need or
want to release updates for your custom distro.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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Re: How portable (relocatable) is a Cygwin installation?

[R0b0t1]

On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 7:08 PM, Andy Li <andy@onthewings.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We are looking for an easy way to distribute an OCaml development
> enviroment based on Cygwin. Someone has an idea of installing all the
> necessary packages and zip the whole Cygwin installation directory and
> distribute the resulting archive.
>
> Is it a good idea? Is the installation path written in a Cygwin
> installation somewhere that may need to be updated when relocating? Is
> there any registry entry or env var required for a Cygwin installation to
> work?
>

This should work. Historically, MSYS(2) has been used for this
purpose. Please reconsider bundling everything with your development
distribution. It would be cleanest to have your users install Cygwin
or MSYS2 separately, perhaps by launching the their installer from
your installer. If multiple development bundles distribute a set of
Unix-like utilities and add them to PATH things will break in hard to
diagnose ways (usually related to very old bundled utilities, but this
is not usually immediately obvious).

The main danger with the reuse of Cygwin installations is that your
user ID on one machine will not match the user ID on another.

Cheers,
     R0b0t1

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Re: How portable (relocatable) is a Cygwin installation?

[Achim Gratz]

Andy Li writes:
> We are looking for an easy way to distribute an OCaml development
> enviroment based on Cygwin.

You're asking to package up a complete software ecosystem on top of a
POSIX emulation layer on top of a non-POSIX OS.  Any which way you slice
it, this will not fit the "easy" qualification you put there.

> Someone has an idea of installing all the necessary packages and zip
> the whole Cygwin installation directory and distribute the resulting
> archive.

Yes, there's always someone with an idea and no, I don't blame them.
I've once thought it might be a neat idea to install Cygwin into a
virtual HD image and distribute it among multiple machines this way.
Even though I think I've enjoyed much tighter control about those
machines than you seem to be able to, it turned out to be impractical.

> Is it a good idea? Is the installation path written in a Cygwin
> installation somewhere that may need to be updated when relocating? Is
> there any registry entry or env var required for a Cygwin installation to
> work?

Provide your own local Cygwin mirror and an install script to
consistenly chose the same set of packages.  Make sure your users update
when you update the mirror.


Regards,
Achim.
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RE: How portable (relocatable) is a Cygwin installation?

[Soegtrop, Michael]

Dear Andy,

here you can find a batch file, which sets up a Cygwin from scratch with a defined set of packages:

https://github.com/coq/coq/blob/master/dev/build/windows/MakeCoq_MinGW.bat

The setup of Cygwin takes about 2 minutes and is without any user interaction. I would say, this is a more reasonable approach. If you want a fixed environment, you should use your own Cygwin repo.

It later calls a shell script which builds ocaml, menhir, libraries like lablgtk and eventually Coq, but I guess this wouldn't be useful for you because this is a MinGW Ocaml and I guess (just a guess) you are using a Cygwin OCaml. But there is no reason why one couldn't setup opam on Cygwin in a similar way.

I think there are also some Cygwin / opam scripts in the CI of Coq. If this would be useful for you, I can point you to the respective scripts.

Best regards,

Michael
Intel Deutschland GmbH
Registered Address: Am Campeon 10-12, 85579 Neubiberg, Germany
Tel: +49 89 99 8853-0, www.intel.de
Managing Directors: Christin Eisenschmid, Christian Lamprechter
Chairperson of the Supervisory Board: Nicole Lau
Registered Office: Munich
Commercial Register: Amtsgericht Muenchen HRB 186928

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