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Re: installation problem SOLVED
Frank Stajano wrote:
> This is a follow-up to my own installation problem as reported in
> http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2003-08/msg01255.html
> to which no reply appeared here yet.
>
> After a lot of attempts and a lot of persistence I discovered that the
> reason for all the strange behaviour was that some of the tarballs in the
> installation directory were missing.
>
> So I went online again (at the office---I was doing an offline installation
> at home, where I only had a modem, so I didn't want to download 100s of MB
> that way) and fetched the stuff from zero into a new directory.
>
> ***And it was still incomplete!*** The problem is with the mirror,
> ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk , because when I downloaded "everything" from it I
> got 125 MB, 117 files, 131 folders whereas when I downloaded everything
> from http://mirrors.sunsite.dk I got 198 MB, 149 files, 155 folders. Now, I
> can't say for sure that this second download isn't also missing something,
> but the first one certainly was.
I used to use mirror.ac.uk, but they we're too unreliable. On more than one
occasion, I downloaded corrupt files (like perl or XFree packages) and they
didn't get it fixed for ages. mirrors.rcn.net on the other hand is the one
I use now and have had no problems at all.
> My humble suggestion would be to add some kind of self check on what's
> there (e.g. a packing list, maybe just the setup.ini, with its MD5 hash) so
> that the setup program could ask the mirror "what are you giving me?" "the
> list of packages as of 2003-08-28" and the setup program could easily check
> if any are missing, in which case it might recommend another mirror.
Unfortunately, this is the way mirrors work. Some are good. Some are bad.
I was thinking about something like this a while ago, and even started writing
the code for it, where the data from `last' would be used to see when a mirror
last updated, and record the findings in a list or page accessible from the
Cygwin home page. You could then add a hook in setup.exe to check whether the
mirror is in sync, if not warn the user.
Having a complete list of files in release/, and having setup.exe churn through
it, and attempt to download the file is (or could be) a lot of work.
Either way, if your interested in working on something like this, you might
want to subscribe to cygwin-apps and start a discussion there (see
<http://cygwin.com/lists.html> for the address).
> I wasted a lot of time on this because I axiomatically assumed that the
> stuff I downloaded was complete and self-consistent, so I believe that a
> self-check at this level would be very useful.
>
> It appears that in my case setup didn't bat an eyelash about the fact that
> setup.ini listed some files that the mirror was not actually supplying for
> download. I would have expected and welcomed a warning. Same applies to an
> install from the local directory, of course.
... Sorry about the signature, it's a must. :-)
--
Elfyn McBratney
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