Subject: Re: Bug in setup.exe 2.194.2.24
From: "Cliff Hones" <[email-masked]>
To: "Robert Collins" <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 12:13:52 +0100

From: "Robert Collins" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 11:29 AM
> There is one additional possibility that has
> occurred to me. Setup is *designed* to redownload files in download-only
> mode. This is not my preference, but was argued over waay back. So in
> download mode, *any* choice other than 'keep' or 'skip' will result in
> the files being downloaded.
> 
> Does that tie in with the behaviour you are reporting? (I finally
> clicked to this just a few minutes ago, or I'd have made  that statement
> *ages* ago.)

Well, yes.  That's kind of what I'd assumed from the original
response to my queries - I was then trying to make the point
that I found that approach rather unintuitive, and also that
the (in my opinion) more obvious behaviour would be much more
useful for people who like to separate download from install,
and would also make setting up a 'local' directory on a
network share for installing multiple machines more straightforward.

The problem seems to be that setup doesn't set these already-present
packages to 'keep' or 'skip' by default, and there's no way for the
user to find out which packages are in this state.

I can't actually see any advantage in re-downloading the packages
*by default*.  I'd agree that one should have the option to re-download
by explicitly selecting a package, but at the moment setup selects the
package for download *because it's not installed* (on the machine doing
the download) and not because it's not present in the local directory.
It also seems wrong that two successive runs of download, with default
options, will cause packages to be re-downloaded.  This is very unhelpful
if one download failed to complete, and you just want to re-fetch what
hadn't been transferred on the previous run.

My 'intuitive' behaviour would be for setup, in download mode, to set
the packages it can see are already present to the 'keep' status.
At the moment, in download mode, setup also excludes packages which
are not currently installed (presumably on the basis that you don't
want to be bothered by offers to download packages you'd earlier taken
a conscious decision not to install).  OK, but I'd like an easy way to
overrule this.  Also, does the current implementation mean that I
won't be informed of a newly-added package by default?

Current behaviour has lead several people to report that setup has
a bug.  And even cgf and the implementors now seem undecided as to
what should be happening.  So can I ask for the design decision to
be re-addressed?  I'd like to hear what the arguments in favour of
the current mechanism are.

-- Cliff

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