Mail Archives: cygwin/2006/08/20/04:02:51
Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
> Øyvind Harboe wrote:
>> One of the reasons that companies distribute Cygwin (often breaching
>> the GPL by not including the source) is that Cygwin setup sucks(I do
>> believe that there is a consensus that Cygwin setup sucks).
>>
>> If the Cygwin install process rocked (e.g. like Debian there was some
>> known stable/unstable/testing collections, zero questions install,
>> automatic mirrors, able to take adavantage of fat internet
>> connections, etc.), I think this would remove a lot of the reasons
>> for distributing Cygwin with a product(which seems fine at first, but
>> creates subtle and hard to solve compatibilty problems).
>>
>> So how about adding a link to Cygwin front page saying something to
>> the effect that "we're looking for sponsors to fix setup and this is
>> what we plan to do"?
>>
>> Or has this already been done? :-)
>>
>
> Actually, I think the only thing that "setup.exe" doesn't currently
> have some capability for is the ability to set priorities on certain
> mirrors based on "some criteria". What that criteria should be has
It also completely lacks a "uninstall all of CygWin, I'm not kidding"
option, or a graceful way to record a setup in vivo, so that the setup of
one machine can be easily duplicated to another. The way the download sites
are listed only by hostname, instead of by complete URL, is also confusing.
It means that if you want to include a mirror manually, you have to guess or
deduce the rest of the URL to use.
I could go on, but you get the point. Eric Raymond's famous rant about
setting up CUPS, and the problems with other open source GUI's, addresses
some of these kinds of issues at
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html.
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