Mail Archives: cygwin/2001/06/29/19:39:21
"Eric M. Monsler" wrote:
I agree with everything you said. I have only one comment:
> The current state of cygwin, with the setup.exe and the current
> documentation, is sufficient that many people in the second category are
> able to use it successfully.
I think you could blame setup.exe for many of the emails that hit this
list. I don't wish it to go away -- I just think that there are a whole
lot of people who, if they're given an installation wizard, expect an
idiot-proof installation process and a drool-proof package when the
installer finishes.
In other words, setup.exe's [relative] polish belies the incomplete
nature of the product it installs.
This same sort of thing happens with Linux, by the way -- you get a
pretty installer with most distros, but Linux isn't a perfect Windows
replacement yet, so a lot of people who try Linux go away thinking
they've been cheated with fancy wrapping around a broken product. This
is just a matter of perception, of course, but Cygwin is a whole lot
more "broken" in this sense than Linux is. This is perfectly
understandable: Cygwin is a magnificent hack, in every Jargon File sense
of that word.
I don't intend specific criticism by these observations. It's just my
assessment of the current state of things.
--
= Warren -- ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m
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