Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/05/09/01:12:52
On Fri, 09 May 2003 00:50:52 -0400, Harold L Hunt II wrote:
>Matt,
>
>You did almost enough research.
>
>You are correct that none of the XFree86 packages depends directory
>or indirectly upon Perl. The little bit of extra research that I
>did for you (other than looking at my setup.hint files again) was to
>run a clean instance of setup.exe (after renaming c:\cygiwn to
>c:\cygwin_foo), select all of the XFree86 packages, then note that
>perl has still not been selected. Thus, no XFree86 packages causes
>perl to be selected.
>
>Here is what happened (even if you don't remember it):
>
>1) You saw package foo (say, autoconf)
>
>2) You thought, ``I might like to have foo''
>
>3) You selected foo, which depends upon perl and caused perl to be
>selected
>
>4) You thought, ``Nah, I will never use foo''
>
>5) You unselected foo, which left all of its dependencies (including
>perl) selected
>
>6) You got perl ;)
>
When I selected the XFree stuff, I started setup.exe and it was in category mode. The only category I picked/expanded was XFree. So, at least in
this session, I did not select any other packages except for what was under XFree. If I had selected them in any other session, I would have had
Perl downloaded in that session. Selections that are not installed are not stored between invocations ( I just proved that).
So there is either a bug in the program or a bug in my head. If I had to make a bet, I'd bet on the bug being in my head, in spite of my protests to
the contrary above. :-)
>Step 5 is crucial there: setup.exe does not unselect dependencies
>when you remove an item from the list of packages to install. Think
>about it, how would we track whether a user selected the package or
>if it was selected by dependency?
With great difficulty.
>Why spend the extra effort
>tracking such things when this is the first time I have seen someone
>ask about this in the 2 or 3 years that I have been working with
>Cygwin/XFree86?
Why indeed?
>You are correct that XFree86 does not depend upon Perl... you just
>got unlucky.
>
>The *.pl scripts in XFree86 mean nothing --- they are not needed for
>the normal operation of the X Server.
>
Then I'll just whack 'em.
>
>I hope that clears things up,
>
Yes, thanks.
--
Matthew O. Persico
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