Mail Archives: cygwin/2006/03/09/12:51:19
From: "Dave Korn" wrote
> On 09 March 2006 05:45, Larrie Carr wrote:
>> I had this problem a couple of months ago. My problem was caused by the
>> setup.exe being very helpful and (at least for me) defaulting to always
>> installing the latest version of anything you already had installed. And
>> if
>> you don't look at the right page, you don't know this is happening.
>
> "The right page" would, of course, be the very front page at
> http://www.cygwin.com/, where it tells you exactly what setup does?
>
> "Once you've installed your desired subset of the Cygwin distribution,
> setup.exe will remember what you selected so rerunning the program will
> update
> your system with any new package releases."
>
> The default /could/ be for setup.exe to do nothing, but that would make
> it
> less useful, particularly for newbies who just want to get a cygwin
> install up
> and running from scratch.
>
>
Don't get me wrong - for every default, there are trade-offs. In the
engineering world, the "do not touch what is working" is the normal
practice. We may stay a version for a year given that you don't change
versions in mid stream unless you really have a problem.
But the latest is not always the best. For instance, octave could only be
compiled with gcc 3.3.3 - but the latest in setup is 3.4.4. I'm fine with
3.3.3 so I don't want to move anytime soon to 3.4.4.
So any time I add a new package with setup, I have to hit the View button to
switch to the "Select Packages", muck with the version to "Keep" gcc (but
you need to do tehm in the right order, or the dependencies cause the Keep
to flip back to Install or 3.4.4 again) and then hit "Next>". Otherwise,
installing something silly like orpie will suddenly move your compiler to
the next version and that starts to break unrelated things.
For the newbie, it's great. But you don't see installing a rpm for orpie
(if one existed) moving your default gcc compiler to a new version. So it
means that NOBODY around here gets to use setup.
If you are going to quote webpages, then I suggest that you add the phrase
"automatically" to the end of that sentence.
Larrie.
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