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Is 1.7 ready?/Installation Issues


Hi!

I've been a loyal fan of cygwin for a number years, and I have the utmost respect for the effort it takes you all to continue to develop it - its a great platform. So first a big big thank you. I don't know where I'd be on my PC without cygwin.

I've been running 1.7 since fairly early on in its life and for a long time now I've been using 1.7 as my base environment at home. However I've never migrated my office system from 1.5. What follows is a few observations which lead me to ask if 1.7 is really ready for release next week.

For many months I've had a stable 1.7 system at home. A couple of times the X server stopped working and then started working again with a subsequent update. Right now its again not working. I'm not going to try and debug that here. On my work system, I've been trying to get 1.7 to work for a few months, numerous attempts without clear success, and recently the updates appear to be worse.

The first problem I have on my work system is that somehow, the base bash files (bashrc etc) don't appear in /etc. Now I could manually install files and probably hack it together, but I've deliberately been careful not to do anything manually like that to determine why or how it got to that state but I've been unsuccessful. I've even completely wiped out the 1.7 dir tree and installed fresh using the latest setup-1.7, and yet the problem continues. I think there is a problem with bash installation.

Secondly, while updating the said "bad" installation, I've noticed 1.7 take absolutely forever to install things in setup and it seems worse this past month. Setup downloads packages cleanly and then begins the installs. This week I updated and it took 4 hours to complete the postinstall process for at most a dozen packages.. CPU was practically idle but it crawled along and eventually completed. Even on Tuesday (I think) when there were only 2 packages to update, it took 2 hours to complete the post install process. It feels like there is a problem in the base locking algorithm that is causing extended delays.

Also, while doing an install, I get errors about files in use, and what I find is that setup (through installation) has spawned a number of bash shells which don't cleanly exit and subsequently block setup until I end them with task manager. Of course, I understand that perhaps that is ultimately degrading the system - but there seems to be a problem with bash shells not exiting and hanging.

Along similar lines I've seen fontconfig just take the CPU and run at 100% for 10s of minutes during an install/update. This is quite a different behaviour and I don't know what its eating so much CPU for during installation.

My home system is an old desktop Pentium 4 hyperthreaded processor running Win XP Home SP3. My work system is a core 2 duo based system running XP Pro SP3

I appreciate that I'm not giving you a lot to go on here, but my gut tells me there are some serious gremlins in the guts and in the installation still, it certainly prevents me from moving my 1.5 system to 1.7 at work and I'm worried that if 1.7 is released you'll be overwhelmed with support requests that are eerily similar. This is why I ask if 1.7 is ready for prime time. Perhaps I'm just being unlucky, and thats ok.

Even during my fresh install (into new dirs) this evening, postinstall for base-cygwin took ages (over 15 mins) with setup sat at 000-cygwin-post-install.sh

Once the install has completed, I'll send my cygcheck output (probably in the morning). I'd appreciate any input on the installation issues - I'll take my X issues to cygwin-xfree after this is fixed. My setup is version 2.661

Looking back through the mail list, I found Jeffrey Friedl report something that sounds very very similar to what I am seeing.

Cheers
Dave


--


Diane & Dave
http://www.velvetstarbears.com/  http://www.kringlecottage.com/
Fortune: The difference between America and England is that the
English think 100 miles is a long distance and the Americans
think 100 years is a long time.



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