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Re: Welcoming Brian Dessent as setup maintainer


Larry Hall wrote:

> I guess I'm wondering why we would want the user to be able to continue
> the installation if the dependencies weren't satisfied (i.e. what value
> the checkbox for the dependencies has).  It seems to me that it guarantees
> a broken installation.  No matter how clearly we state to the user that
> this will be the result, I can't imagine anyone taking this route and
> being pleased with the result.  So that just leaves us with the folks that
> didn't understand or didn't pay attention and went ahead anyway.  Granted,
> that's recoverable but it means we'll get questions on the list about it.
> If I'm right about that, then it seems to me that this would be a good
> argument from only allowing them to continue with the dependencies found
> or to go back and change their original selections.

You may be onto something there.  The whole point of this exercise was
to reduce broken Cygwin installations, and reduce unhappy users.  If
having a broken installation is still possible by misunderstanding a
dialog but continuing anyway, then it doesn't really net anything.

I can think of some situations where you might find it handy to override
setup's wishes, but I have to admit most of them are pretty far fetched.

The only one that makes any sense is when you're trying to uninstall a
large dependency tree, such as if you want to get rid of X11.  The last
time I tried this it was quite hard, since you would turn off one
package, but in the process of cycling the next you would wind up
re-enabling the one you just turned off.  I think it's possible to do it
but you have to do something really stupid like put half the packages in
'Source', then disable the other half, then finally you can cycle the
first set to Uninstall since there's no version number in between Source
and Uninstall.  Makes me kind of sick just thinking about expecting
someone not familiar with setup to figure that out.

I guess that gets into a whole other area though, that you should either
be able to mass-deselect a number of packages at once, or have some way
of deselecting a package without cycling through other versions of it.
:/

But back to Larry's point.  Should we refuse to even give them the rope
lest they hang themselves?

Brian


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