Subject: Re: Setup.exe update problem
From: James Dumser <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 10:27:31 -0500

On Tue, 16 May 2000 14:25:39 -0700, Tom Weichmann <[email-masked]>
wrote:
>         I just wanted to let you know about a small problem I ran into
> while updating from 1.1.0 to 1.1.1.  When attempting to download
> the new setup.exe from the mirror in Tennessee my FTP client
> reported that it could not find any files on this server.  I switched
> to the California mirror and Downloaded setup.exe.  I executed 'setup
> -u cygwin'.  I picked the franken.de mirror as the mirror to get the
> update from.  Setup told me nothing needed to be updated;
> installation took 43 seconds.  I knew that this was not right so I
> tried again.  This time I downloaded setup.exe from franken.de, and
> again executing 'setup -u cygwin', choosing franken.de as the
> update mirror.  This time setup.exe began to download the new
> update.

I tried running setup today. (Setup was downloaded from a mirror -- it
was the one listed after ftp.yggdrasil.com on the list of mirrors at the
time, maybe *free*.com? -- on 15 May.) I noticed that instead of the 25
or so mirrors that were previously listed, there were only 7 listed
today. The only US mirror was sourceware.cygnus.com.

sourceware doesn't seem to like anonymous ftp -- at least not from the
machines behind our firewall that I've tried. Is anonymous ftp disabled
or am I running into some kind of security/spam protection? The
sourceware web site doesn't seem to provide any hints as to what the
problem might be.

Another issue -- and I haven't looked at setup's source -- concerns its
handling of timestamps. When I tried to update to cygwin-1.1.1 (from
20000310 or whatever), setup -u cygwin did not find any updates. (I had
only installed the 2000* version the day before -- after the 1.1.1
announcement.) In order to get the update, I had to drop the -u option,
which then downloaded both 2000* and 1.1.1 and installed them in the
wrong order (2000* over 1.1.1). To get it to install the correct thing,
I had to setup cygwin-1.1.1.

Setup appears to use the current time as the "timestamp" used to track
packages. So when I downloaded 2000*, its install time was the current
time. When 1.1.1 later was propagated to the mirror, it retained the
timestamp from sourceware, which was earlier than 2000*'s install time
so setup didn't see 1.1.1 as an update.

Maybe install time is a good thing to track; but for updates, what is
really needed is the file's timestamp.

-- 
Jim Dumser  [email-masked]

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