X-Recipient:	archive-cygwin AT delorie DOT com
X-SWARE-Spam-Status:	No, hits=-1.6 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00
X-Spam-Check-By:	sourceware.org
Message-ID:	<4F4FD01E.1000808@bopp.net>
Date:	Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:38:06 -0600
From:	Jeremy Bopp <jeremy AT bopp DOT net>
User-Agent:	Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20120216 Thunderbird/10.0.2
MIME-Version:	1.0
To:	cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject:	Re: Recent upgrade to wish leads to a problem
References:	<70952A932255A2489522275A628B97C3129F4CE4 AT xmb-sjc-233 DOT amer DOT cisco DOT com> <4F4FC897 DOT 1080604 AT redhat DOT com>
In-Reply-To:	<4F4FC897.1080604@redhat.com>
X-IsSubscribed:	yes
Mailing-List:	contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
List-Id:	<cygwin.cygwin.com>
List-Subscribe:	<mailto:cygwin-subscribe AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Archive:	<http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/>
List-Post:	<mailto:cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Help:	<mailto:cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com>, <http://sourceware.org/ml/#faqs>
Sender:	cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Mail-Followup-To:	cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Delivered-To:	mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com

On 03/01/2012 01:05 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 03/01/2012 10:53 AM, Matt Seitz (matseitz) wrote:
>> You don't think that Setup telling the user "package xyz requires
>> package xinit" might at least tip off some users that running xyz now
>> requires starting an X server?
>>
>> Even if it doesn't reduce the questions, would it at least reduce the
>> problem of users now having to run Setup a second time to download and
>> install the xinit package?
> 
> While I can't control whether Yaakov adds xinit as a dependency to
> tcl-tk, I personally wouldn't mind adding xinit as a prereq to gitk and
> git-gui, since I maintain that package.  There's still that annoyance
> factor that just depending on xinit won't get X running, but at least it
> will let you download all the bits in one run of setup.exe instead of
> hitting the FAQ and finding out you have to rerun setup.exe.

I don't think I've ever seen it, but does setup.exe support the notion
of recommended and/or suggested packages?

It seems that the main issue is that xinit is not a hard dependency of
these tools/libraries and thus they should not have a hard dependency on
xinit defined in the package definition.  However, it might make sense
to make xinit a recommended dependency that setup.exe could offer to
install by default or at least notify the user that they may want to
install.

Less sophisticated users of setup.exe could select to always install all
recommended packages by default (this may be the default setting) while
more advanced users may disable that option in order to be more choosy.
 While this wouldn't help the problem of users needing to actually start
the X server before using the dependent tools and libraries, it would at
least give them a chance to get what they need in a single pass of
running setup.exe rather than needing to run it again and try to select
the correct additional packages.

-Jeremy

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple

- Raw text -