Broken dependencies? Bad Mirrors causing hidden problems? Was Re: New Installation fails: cygreadline7.dll not found.

[Richard Troy <rtroy at ScienceTools dot com>]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2011, Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
>
> On 12/14/2011 10:51 PM, Richard Troy wrote:
> >
> > Hi Folks,
> >
> > I'm a long-time Cygwin user and recently got a new Windows 7 box that
> > needed to be taught bash and other neat tricks, so naturally I downloaded
> > the latest version - 1.7.9-1, I believe - and then did the installation
> > from the local repository. I told it to install "absolutely everything".
> >
> > When it got to the end, the post installation activities failed in
> > spectacular fashion. My guess is none of the Cygwin post-installation
> > functions were actually performed. The first one to fail was
> > /etc/postinstall/000-cygwin-post-install.sh, which complained that
> > cygreadline7.dll was missing. This was followed by a large number of
> > errors substantially identical to that (differing only in what program was
> > complaining), and then there were 202 errors where various packages
> > complained about some package component returning "exit code -1073741515".
> >
> > Sure enough, there is no cygreadline7.dll on the box. Hmmm...
> >
> > ...I figured this must be a common problem, but didn't find it in the FAQ,
> > and when I did a search of the e-list, it returned zero matches for
> > "cygreadline7.dll" and "missing". A web search yielded no results, either.
> >
> > I have cygreadline7.dll available on other boxes, in /bin, but the new
> > system doesn't have it, and the only file starting with "cygr" in /bin is
> > cygrunsrv, yet there are other .dll files in the /bin directory.
> >
> > Can I / should I merely copy over the cygreadline7.dll from an older
> > installation of cygwin? Other comments / ideas?  ...I apologize in advance
> > if I missed something obvious.
>
> I recommend running 'setup.exe' again and selecting 'libreadline7' from the
> list of packages.  That should help.

Hmmm...

I tried that and setup didn't show such a package! So, I tried a different
mirror and found it elsewhere. It's downloading now.

However, this brings up a VERY key point, I think: How was it possible for
me to do an installation like this and NOT get readline? And not know
about it at the time? I mean, shouldn't the dependencies mechanisms caught
this?  If I download an incomplete set of materials from some mirror
somewhere, how do I catch this other than just trying to fix whatever
problems crop up?

This has me thinking that over the years I may have had this happen before
to me and my coleagues as, for example, quite notably sshd wouldn't work
and I never had the time to troubleshoot it...

For that matter, can I download an ISO image from somewhere and thus
guarantee I get the whole thing? Buy a DVD?

Thanks,
Richard


-- 
Richard Troy, Chief Scientist
Science Tools Corporation
rtroy@ScienceTools.com, http://ScienceTools.com/


--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple