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Re: Why is setup.exe so difficult? Am I missing something?
On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Brian Dessent wrote:
> Christopher Faylor wrote:
>
> > The 'now-abandoned "install it all at once"' problem was unabandoned two
> > setup releases ago (I believe), recent advice notwithstanding. Maybe
> > the setup developers will correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK, there is no
> > longer any reason to split a cygwin install into two.
>
> The original reason for the advice was because there was a handle leak,
> which caused problems if setup tried to extract from a large number of
> .tar.bz2s in one session. That has been corrected (I think?) and so in
> theory it should no longer matter.
FWIW, I haven't had any problems with rather complex (i.e., much larger
than "base") installs with recent setup versions. I haven't tried the
full install.
> It's possible that there is still something wacked in the postinstall
> ordering that would cause errors if you tried to go from zero to every
> available package in one go. I'll have to try that scenario and see if
> I can make it happen. Though AFAIK it should run them in dependency
> order and work fine.
>
> Brian
No, until <http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2005-09/msg00503.html> is
applied, setup will run postinstall scripts in alphabetical order.
> (It's unfortunate that most of the sentences above are "in theory" and
> "I think". I would like to say for sure that it should work, but it's
> not something that I've personally done that often because to be honest
> I really loathe the idea that one would have to install all 2.4GB of
> stuff just because one didn't know what was required.)
It should be reasonably easy to add a dialog box that asks such people
"Are you SURE you want to install EVERYTHING? That's 2.4GB!". That ought
to discourage superfluous full installs. The number in the box could be
easily computed from setup.ini.
However, I've suggested previously to create a few "installation profiles"
(e.g., "development", that includes "make", "gcc", "vi", etc, or
"maintainer development", which also adds the autotools). I'm not
volunteering to implement this, as I'm devoting my time to a new UI, but
it shouldn't be particularly hard -- these "profiles" sound like simple
"sets of package names". Initially, they may even duplicate information
(so, the "maintainer development" example profile above will include all
the packages from the "development" profile, instead of having a
dependence on it). This looks sufficiently decoupled from the setup
versioning and package selection logic that it doesn't require very deep
knowledge of it, and is a good exercise to gain more such knowledge. Any
takers?
Igor
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