From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Masterson, Dave" To: "'cygwin@cygwin.com'" Subject: RE: Questions about Cygwin's setup... Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 11:45:00 -0000 Message-id: <5C838890A2EDD411AFB2009027CC67091A2B78@cupex3.rational.com> X-SW-Source: 2001-01/msg01309.html Well, strictly speaking, I am not a Windows system administrator -- actually I'm a UNIX developer who happens to be working in a Windows group at the moment. I was just considering introducing a UNIX environment to the group (they already have a messy MKS environment) in as low maintenance an approach as possible. My previous message was just a couple of ideas that would make that easier. With respect to managing packages on a Windows system, what I've seen done by others is to put the installable packages (usually copies of the package's original CD) up on some central share somewhere and then leave it to the individual local system admins (usually the user of that system) to install and maintain the package on the system. In this sense, network shares in Windows-NT are often used in the opposite manner of NFS mounts in UNIX (ie. the shares hold centralized data whereas the NFS mounts hold centralized programs). For the most part, this is often forced by the licensing and installation structure of these packages (ie. single-user, single-machine licenses). Cygwin and all the GNU tools, though, are open-source (free source?) products and, so, shouldn't suffer from the strictures of a copyright license. I have installed a great many of these GNU tools on a central UNIX server and made them available to many UNIX systems (all they had to do was mount the drive and adjust their PATH). In fact, I have a Perl package around here somewhere that allowed me to maintain multiple versions of the installed packages so as to allow developers to test against old versions of tools if they needed (it also addressed the "clean" uninstall issue). From what I can see of the Cygwin environment, it is very close to having this capability as well. My original questions concerning what Setup.exe does with respect to the registry and such were to find out how close. Another post suggested a slightly kludgy way of doing what I want (I'm still thinking about how to apply it). However, the post at least confirms that other people want to do what I'm suggesting and have investigated ways to workaround the current Setup.exe to do it. Ultimately, though, I think Setup.exe package should facilitate this type of a setup (or, at least, not do anything to get in the way). In that, I think the "nice to haves" would be: * a command line tool that would create the necessary registry entries for Cygwin (so that it can be put into a batch script for all the users to run). * a "setup" package that could be kept local and updated like any other package. -----Original Message----- From: Christopher Faylor [ mailto:cgf@redhat.com ] Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2001 10:36 AM To: cygwin@cygwin.com Subject: Re: Questions about Cygwin's setup... You know, this really isn't specifically a Cygwin issue. If you are a administering a number of Windows systems on a network, how do you deal with this normally? Most Windows packages do something to the registry. Most Windows packages are updated from time to time. How would you deal with this issue with other Windows packages? Maybe you need to do a google.com or deja.com search and see what kind of solutions are available out there. cgf On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 10:35:43AM -0800, Masterson, Dave wrote: >Hmmm. Wget is not a complete answer. What if my "user" doesn't want to >mirror it on his system because he feels the network access to the server is >fast enough? Also, there is still the issue of the registry entries >(remember, I'm not "installing" it on the user's system). > >-----Original Message----- >From: Earnie Boyd [ mailto:earnie_boyd@yahoo.com ] >Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2001 7:21 PM >To: Masterson, Dave >Cc: 'Earnie Boyd' >Subject: Re: Questions about Cygwin's setup... > > >"Masterson, Dave" wrote: >> >> Hmmm. The cygwin mailer does some strange things with Reply-to. Your >> message has a Reply-to of "Earnie Boyd ". Is this >> intentional? >> > >Yes, it is intentional. It's a means of keeping it in the forum and >avoiding private conversation. > >> With respect to my message, it should be obvious that I'm trying to setup >a >> "minimum" install of Cygwin. My thought was that, since only I in my >group >> pay attention to what goes on with Cygwin, I could maintain a central area >> where Cygwin is. > >Understandable. > >> I suppose I could send out occassional messages that say >> something like "rerun \\my\setup.exe to update your Cygwin", but it would >be >> much better if it just happened automatically. > >I thought you were setting up Cygwin itself centrally. Once setup the >local workstation would then not need changed. > >> Thus the idea of a pre-setup >> central share that I (the Cygwin admin) maintain. Also, if the speed of >the >> central share, it probably wouldn't be hard to make a batch script to >mirror >> it to a local drive (which I might write). >> > >Use wget to mirror. > >> With respect to your answers: >> >> * Why not make setup a package (say "cygwinsetup") like all the rest so >that >> it could potentially update itself? >> > >Just use wget. Setup a cron job to run weekly or what ever frequency >you desire. > >Cheers, >Earnie. > >_________________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com > >-- >Want to unsubscribe from this list? >Check out: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple -- cgf@cygnus.com Red Hat, Inc. http://sources.redhat.com/ http://www.redhat.com/ -- Want to unsubscribe from this list? Check out: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple -- Want to unsubscribe from this list? Check out: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple