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Date:	Thu, 23 Jan 2014 15:18:35 +0000
From:	Cliff Hones <cliff AT hones DOT org DOT uk>
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Subject:	Re: Reduce noise in dependency declaration during uninstall in setup.exe
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On 23/01/2014 14:36, Warren Young wrote:
> On 1/22/2014 18:13, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> If you were actually volunteering to do something then it wasn't made
>> clear by your long email or in your lack of response to Larry's SHTDI.
> 
> I'm not going to volunteer until I have some concept of the scope of work, and some idea of how you'd want the problem solved.  That's why it would have been better if your reply had given me some guidance.
> 
> Maybe I should be flattered that you think I can just jump into the middle of the single most complicated part of setup.exe, its very core, and not only figure out a way to solve my issue, but to actually solve it in a way that's going to be accepted.

I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong, but I suspect the problem with
maintenance/extension of setup.exe is twofold: firstly, it's a non-Cygwin
program and secondly it is large and not well structured.  Also, the original
implementer/maintainer has long since left the Cygwin community.

One solution to this would be to reimplement it as two separate parts - a
non-Cygwin envelope (which could even be installed as an msi) and a
Cygwin-based package maintainer.  The Cygwin-based part would be a
completely separate Cygwin installation, with its own cygwin1.dll, and
a minimal set of utilities, and would not interfere with the main installation.
The non-cygwin wrapper would simply install/update this mini-Cygwin system
and invoke the Cygwin-based package maintainer.

The package maintainer would be based on the existing setup.exe, and would
benefit from being able to take advantage of the Cygwin layer - in particular
that would remove the need to back-port Cygwin knowledge into the various
filesystem-related components of setup.exe such as tar.  Indeed, the package
maintainer need not have a built-in tar as it could use (a private copy of)
the main Cygwin tar utility.

As I see it the main downside of this is the problem of implementing a
windows GUI in a Cygwin program without the overhead of using X.

It would be a lot of work to get there - but once in place I imagine there
would be a lot more volunteer effort to maintain/improve it.

And no - sorry, I'm not offering to do any of the work.  It would be fun but
I just haven't the time.

-- Cliff


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