On 16/12/2020 21:44, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Dec 2020 at 20:31, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
>> I have several packages I need the Cygwin source repositories for, but
>> there is no link from https://cygwin.org/packages/package_list.html to
>> the cygwin source.
>>
>> In a few cases the repositories are also out of date (mostly Python
>> stuff, probably your packages adopted from Yaakov, Marco Atzeri?).
>>
>> I was wondering if there's a good way to find these/if someone might
>> know of the top of their head if I list them?
>>
>> It's quite a lot of packages, so it's likely better if I can be given
>> pointers.
>>
>> Full disclaimer: I specifically need the source repos and not just the
>> source packages because I'm using them for an automated source bundling
>> tool for my DDRescue-GUI Windows bundle (which is open source but
>> commercial). I've spent ages writing the script and I'd rather not do it
>> over again / make lots of modifications and break it.
>>
>> Any ideas?
> Yes, but I don't think you'll like it: use the source packages, not
> the repositories. There's no obligation or expectation that package
> maintainers make their source code available in any way other than
> through providing a source package. Some do provide a public
> repository and make it readily available, but I would not be at all
> surprised if some maintainers – particularly for packages that don't
> get many upstream updates – don't use version control at all.
>
> Further, remember for GPL-like licenses you need to provide *all* the
> source code that's used to create the binaries you're distributing,
> including both the upstream source code and any Cygwin-specific
> patches or modifications. Those will normally be in two separate
> repositories, and there's no guarantee it'll be easy to find one from
> the other. Taking Git as an easy example, since it's a package I
> maintain and am familiar with: you'd need to find both
> https://github.com/me-and/Cygwin-Git/ and
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git if you wanted the
> underlying repositories, and I can't think of any way to get from one
> to the other that's not incredibly fragile. And, as I say, I suspect
> there are a bunch of packages in Cygwin where it's much more
> difficult, if not impossible.
>
> I think a much better route here would be to parse the setup.ini files
> (e.g. https://mirrorservice.org/sites/sourceware.org/pub/cygwin/x86_64/setup.ini)
> to work out the paths of the source packages that correspond to each
> of the release packages you're using, and to use those. That's going
> to be less work and also less fragile than trying to hunt down
> repositories that may not even exist.
>
> Adam

This really worked a treat, did the job much better.

Thanks so much! :)

Hamish