From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 4630 invoked by alias); 25 Jul 2010 04:02:27 -0000 Received: (qmail 4530 invoked by uid 22791); 25 Jul 2010 04:02:25 -0000 X-SWARE-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.5 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_50 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from mail32.mailforbusiness.com (HELO mail32.mailforbusiness.com) (64.106.209.59) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.43rc1) with ESMTP; Sun, 25 Jul 2010 04:02:18 +0000 Received: from mail32.mailforbusiness.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mail32.mailforbusiness.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 955AF13419F for ; Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:02:15 -0400 (EDT) Received: from [192.168.1.21] (unknown [72.183.123.157]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-CAMELLIA256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) (Authenticated sender: jeremy@bopp.net) by mail32.mailforbusiness.com (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 4D43113419E for ; Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:02:15 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <4C4BB746.1090006@bopp.net> Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 20:08:00 -0000 From: Jeremy Bopp User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.10) Gecko/20100528 Thunderbird/3.0.5 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: cygwin@cygwin.com Subject: Re: Request for feature: more flexible setup routine References: <30EAF1C130A74F97AC4C82B42ED55DAE@hometoshiba> In-Reply-To: <30EAF1C130A74F97AC4C82B42ED55DAE@hometoshiba> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin@cygwin.com X-SW-Source: 2010-07/txt/msg00531.txt.bz2 On 07/24/2010 07:10 PM, Marshall Abrams wrote: > I am *not* going to install 1.7. Not now. I'm in the > middle of a project. I just wanted one little tool. It sounds like you're still running Cygwin 1.5. While it's no longer supported, you can download setup-legacy.exe from cygwin.com and use that to update your installation and avoid the full upgrade to Cygwin 1.7. Keep in mind, however, that Cygwin 1.5 and its associated packages have not seen any maintenance since December 2009. Given your situation, that will likely suit you fine. > What I hope will be added is some way to allow setup.exe to look farther > back in the past, or automatically ignore most package releases. > Something--something so that I can get the functionality of setup.exe > for one or two packages when I haven't updated anything for > while--because it was working fine! Google for the Cygwin Time Machine. That should let you peer back in time with quite a bit of granularity and install what you find using an unmodified setup.exe. I think you may need to grab a pre-Cygwin 1.7 version of setup.exe from somewhere, though, in order to make use of the time machine. Maybe the time machine will have something appropriate you can use. > And I don't fix what's not broken. What you see as not broken, may be quite broken for a newer package which has a dependency you refused to update. Deference to the package maintainers is well-advised. > One time in five something is > installed that screws up something I had working. That's not a > complaint; it's inevitable with a complex system. I also don't > regularly upgrade everything, because when I do I sometimes have to fix > something major, or just fix some packages that has been "improved" in > such a way that I can no longer work the way I want without undoing > something and recustomizing it. Again: Inevitable with a complex system.) I think it's pretty abnormal to have problems resulting from updates in 1 out of every 5 update attempts. I update all my installed packages once every few weeks, and when I add packages, I allow setup to update all the others as necessary. I rarely experience failures or incompatibilities with my configurations, but my coworkers who virtually never update frequently have the troubles you're trying to avoid when they are eventually forced to do so. Your update difficulties are likely the result of a combination of manually holding package revisions back and updating infrequently. In the first case you risk missing critical package updates, and in the second case you will most likely accumulate a large number of poorly documented migration steps which must be performed all at once in the proper sequence. You might find it advantageous to perform full updates on a monthly schedule so that you can plan for possible downtime and take the work in sips rather than drink from a fire hose. If you're really worried about being unable to roll back an unsuccessful update, copy your entire Cygwin installation directory to a backup location before running setup.exe and then perform a full update of all installed packages. If the update breaks something, restore the installation directory from the backup. Then retry the update, restricting what gets updated, until you get the best behavior possible. This should work for both Cygwin 1.5 and 1.7. Good luck. -Jeremy -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple