Re: Installing/upgrading only NOARCH packages.

[Jon Turney <jon.turney@dronecode.org.uk>]

On 19/04/2023 12:30, Carlo B. via Cygwin wrote:
> Hello,
> after the 32-bit port of CYGWIN has been obsoleted, I was looking for
> a way for installing or upgrading the NOARCH packages, like the
> libraries for the mingw cross compilers for example.
> Unfortunately, I have not found an existing way for doing it.
> Is it possible to do it?

The x86 archive contains a set of noarch packages frozen at the same 
instant that the x86-arch packages were.

We don't just do that to be awkward:

The most obvious problem is with data-only noarch packages depended on 
by archful packages - at some unknown time (probably in the future, but 
who knows), some x86 package is going to stop working usefully with the 
data provided by some current noarch package, due to skew between the 
repositories.

The only practical approach, consuming a fixed, limited amount of 
effort, is to freeze the noarch packages available to x86 installs as well.

> Otherwise, I'm searching for the sources of the setup program for
> adding this feature in my local installation. I have seen that setup
> utility has a "--arch" option, but it accepts only "x86_64" or "x86",
> according to the "--help" printed on screen.
> So, I'm planning to add a "noarch" in addition to "x86_64" and "x86"
> to this option.

This probably isn't going to work the way you imagine it will: we don't 
provide noarch packages as a separate repository, so you'd have to 
extract that information from the x86_64 repository manifest, and merge 
it into the x86 repository manifest.

The easiest way to do this would probably be to create a local package 
repository as a clone of the x86 archive, then replace the noarch 
packages with those from the current x86_64 package repository, and 
regenerate the manifest with mksetupini.

However, I have no idea if you'd end up with something useful, or not. 
Maybe just importing the mingw* cross packages would be safest?  Anyhow, 
if it breaks, you get to keep all the pieces...

You might want to compare the ongoing effort that involves to just 
migrating to x86_64 :)

> Where can I get the latest development sources of the setup utility?

Following the link at [1] takes you to [2], which should contain the 
information you require.

[1] https://cygwin.com/install.html#source
[2] https://sourceware.org/cygwin-apps/setup.html