Subject: Re: b19 and cygwin.dll
From: [email-masked] (Craig Dickson)

20 Feb 1998 14:05:12 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
To: "Bartlee A. Anderson" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>

Bartlee A. Anderson wrote:

>Are you using mingw32 or cygwin32?
>How have you used COM in a project?
>Do you have any source.
>I don't know why registration of COM is concerned with the setup of
>the mingw32/cygwin32.
>I do agree with Marty that installation should be piecemeal. But I think
>that there are some volunteers to make useful instructions and or
>releases for general consumption. But If we are aiming a product at a
>mass market, I don't think it will be a compiler suite. Programmers are
>expected to be "technical" and I hope a little smarter than the average
>computer user. We wouldn't be needed much otherwise.
>The above questions are real and are for my edification to help
>understand your position.

I understood Marty Leisner to be saying that he dislikes -- in general, not
just for cygwin or programming tools -- the Win32 standard of having
"installer" and "uninstaller" applications to add or remove software from
the system, and that he wants software to be delivered as separate
components with documentation to allow him to understand what all the pieces
are and how they relate to each other so that he can manually set them up
however he wishes. I was just observing that while that might be fine for
technically astute users, the vast majority of Win32 users would be unable
to cope with such tasks for any but the simplest applications. Windows 95,
in particular, is a mass-market OS and its standards must be based on the
needs of less-knowledgeable users.

For cygwin specifically, which doesn't have any terribly complicated
interactions with the Win32 system (no COM objects; the registry seemingly
used only for filesystem mounting; no components shared with non-cygwin
apps; no modifications of system config files other than to set environment
variables, etc.), I wouldn't mind at all if it had no installer/uninstaller;
in fact, its installer seems to do nothing other than unpack the
distribution (you still have to set up environment variables by hand, for
instance, which most installers do automatically). Given the nature of
cygwin's audience, that would be just fine. But if Mr. Leisner meant to
limit his comments to cygwin, that was not clear to me.

Craig

-
For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to
"[email-masked]" with one line of text: "help".