Re: Base Cygwin now requires Python?

[Charles Wilson <cygwin at cwilson dot fastmail dot fm>]

On 5/16/2013 2:41 AM, Steven Penny wrote:
> Because of this dependency line
>
> mintty
>   cygutils
>    desktop-file-utils
>     libglib2.0_0
>      python-gobject
>       python
>
> A base Cygwin install now requires Python. Can this be changed? While Python is
> a good language I hardly feel it is appropriate to add that bulk to a base
> install.

I agree. It's an unintended consequence of this change:

2011-10-27  Yaakov Selkowitz  <...>

        Integrate cygstart with FD.o menu and mimetype system.
        * src/cygstart/cygstart.desktop: New file.
        * src/cygstart/cygutils.xml: New file.
        * Makefile.am: Dist and install these files.
        * NEWS: Update documentation.

which caused the (auto-generated) postinstall script to have the 
following two commands:

/usr/bin/update-desktop-database
/usr/bin/update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

which in turn, caused the (auto-generated) dependency list to include 
desktop-file-utils and shared-mime-info.

There are a couple of choices:

1) override the (auto-generated) dependencies to not list those tools
   a) then the postinstall script will fail, but maybe that's ok

2) override the (auto-generated) postinstall script to check existence
   before calling those tools (and also #1?)
   a) at least that way the postinstall script won't report failure

3) teach cygport to autogenerate the postinstall script such that it
   checks existence first, before calling the tools.
   a) probably too hard to ALSO teach it to recognize conditional usage
      of the tools so as to avoid listing desktop-file-utils and
      shared-mime-info when auto-generating the dependency list, so
   b) probably need to do #1 here, as well.

In the meantime, I'm going to do #1 on the server, so that these deps 
aren't pulled in to a base install. That means the script will fail, 
until we resolve the issue.

Yaakov, any comments?

--
Chuck
cygutils maintainer

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