RE: setup.exe: Woe is me!

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu>]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2003, Phil Bewig wrote:

> I just killed setup.exe after over an hour of inactivity.  A total
> of over 125MB of disk space has disappeared in the last few
> hours while I have been running setup.exe, reading and
> replying to email on the cygwin mailing list in this thread
> using MS Outlook, and searching the cygwin mailing list
> archives with MSIE.  When I killed setup.exe (using the
> "cancel" button on the progress screen), I received a popup
> message "Cannot open log file d:\/var/log/setup.log for
> writing."  Are there any additional clues here?  What is
> consuming disk?  And how do I get it back?
>
> Thanks again,
> Phil

Phil,

Setup.exe first downloads the tarballs of the Cygwin packages from your
chosen mirror to your local disk, into a subdirectory of the "Local
Installation Directory".  If you're on a dial-up connection, it may take
quite a while, depending on the number of packages you chose to install.
Once all the packages are downloaded, setup.exe switches to the
installation phase, where it installs the files contained in those
packages (by unpacking them).  The third phase runs whatever postinstall
scripts were in those packages.

My guess is that the space has been taken up by the local cache directory.
Setup.exe runs in multiple threads.  The files are downloaded in a
separate thread from the main thread (that handles Windows messages and
updates the main window).  If the main thread is hung, downloads will
still continue, giving the impression of disappearing disk space.  The
fact that the "Cancel" button works means that the main thread is not
truly hung, but something is probably screwed up with the sequencing logic
somewhere...  It would be really nice to get a gdb backtrace, since it's
so reproducible for you.
	Igor
P.S.  FYI, larger packages (e.g., tetex) easily run into tens of megabytes
-- 
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Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
  -- Leto II


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