New Cygwin "setup" program useless on my Win-XP box. Not very nice at all.

[Rus <gemesys@idirect.com>]

Hi,
I have cygwin utilities installed on an upgraded/enhanced Win-XP box.
There are several reasons (too much to go into here), that I need to maintain
this new box, but run it with the original Win-XP/SP3 O/S.

It would be nice if I could access some of the Cygwin utilities that I do not have.
I have a nice, stable, reasonably modern version of several utilies (eg: ssh and scp),
and they all work flawlessly.  The Samba stuff also works well here, and allows
interconnection with a broad spectrum of various devices of various vintages. (All
are useful - Blackberry Playbooks, several versions of Android devices, iPads (several
versions), etc.

I understand that Cygwin 2.5.2 was the last version that actually worked with Windows-XP.
I tried to run the setup-x86.exe program, and it just fails.  Quite unfortunate, as this
will simply force me to abandon further usage of Cygwin.

Short of messing around with the "Cygwin Time Machine", is there a simple way to just
download some of the 2.5.2 source and/or the executables? (I need bzip2.exe, for example,
and I find I only had gzip.exe installed.  Arrrrgh.).

Typically, when new software versions are introduced, which crash compatability with
software versions which were previously installed in many areas, by many users, the
developers will maintain setup-methods or apt-get style repositories of older versions
of the code, so that users bound to early, popular platforms, can *easily* access
previous versions of useful utility software.

For example: The VideoLAN people make all their older versions of their VLC product for
iOS available at the URL: https://get.videolan.org/vlc-iOS/

This has proved to be very useful for iPad-1 owners, who were thrown under the bus by
Apple, which refuses to release any O/S software beyond iOS 5.1.1 for their gen-1 device,
nor allow previous VLC versions to be offered in the Apple iStore.  The VideoLAN folks
provide 2.1.3 of VLC - both source and .IPA file, so the original, compatible software
can be installed (if you "jailbreak" your iPAd), on the older device, so as to recover
the ability to play videos on that device.

Perhaps you might consider something similar for Cygwin?  Since the current Cygwin
"setup-x86.exe" does not work at all with Windows-XP, why not simply have A DIRECT LINK
TO THE 2.5.2 SETUP which does work?  No doubt, if you are using releases numbers, and
version control, you probably have a nice source-hive and binaries for 2.5.2.  Why not
make these availble to existing Cygwin users like myself, who would like to obtain a
working cygwin utility?  Isn't this the whole point of your project efforts?  Let the
Windows users have access to some sensible Unix/Linux utilities?  A bunch of people put
some serious time and effort in to making all this great unix/Linux stuff for Windows,
and a bunch of folks already have the needed .DLL's in their Win-32 library to run the
stuff.  At the very least, someone might consider offering a working pointer to whereever
the Cygwin 2.5.2 Windows-XP compliant source-and-binaries hive has been hidden.

- Mark Langdon,
   Waterloo, Canada.

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