This is the mail archive of the cygwin-apps@cygwin.com mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: Time to kill the "diff" empty upgrade helper?


Charles Wilson wrote:
Christopher Faylor wrote:

Not hurting, really.  More like just looking untidy.  I was thinking
that it wouldn't be a bad idea to streamline "Base", and started with
the most obvious target.  (I'm currently running without "diff",
"ncurses", "readline" and "login", to test whether they are suitable
candidates for un-"Base"-ing.)
Oh yeah, and the real reason I replied in this thread. I've noticed a number of "upgrade helpers" -- like 'diff', but especially texmf/tetex. I'm a reasonably clued-in cygwin user, but I haven't had tetex installed because I use MikTeX. However, just the other day I found myself thinking, while staring at the package list, "How would I install cygwin TeX? There's a half-dozen 'tetex*' packages, another half-dozen 'texmf*' packages. Which ones do I need?"

Then I **scrolled** over to the right, and saw that the texmf packages, and tetex-beta, were marked as 'upgrade helpers'. Ah HA, thought I. I don't need the texmf packages -- as a savvy cygwin user, *I* know what "upgrade helper" means -- it means that the packages were once called texmf, but have been renamed. Given the limitations of old (current?) setup.exe, we need these empty 'upgrade helpers' to smooth the renaming process.

How many newbies know that? Assuming they scrolled far enough to the right to see the 'upgrade helper' text, which isn't visible in the current chooser window w/o scrolling?

Sure, it won't HURT if they install all of texmf* and tetex*, since the empty upgrade helpers are negligible in size and have little effect on the installation. But it's confusing to newbies.

Perhaps upgrade helpers should be in a category of their own, like
"Upgrade Helpers" with a description string "Installed Automatically if needed; do not select manually"

Which brings me to another point: is it possible for the chooser to display sdesc strings (hardcoded by upset into setup.ini, perhaps?) for categories?

--Chuck


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]