Subject: Re: setup 2.194.2.24: Bug (?) in downloading from internet
From: Sam Edge <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 21:11:52 +0100

Gary R. Van Sickle wrote in
<[email-masked]>
in gmane.os.cygwin on Sun, 28 Apr 2002 14:12:36 -0500:

> What am I missing in all these posts?  Didn't somebody post a while ago that if
> you set your "Local Package Directory" to a network share and do "Install From
> Internet", you get all the functionality people are wanting here?

No. You can use the same local package directory to install on
multiple machines very nicely. That aspect works fine.

The problem is that when you do "download from Internet" the list
tells you what you have installed in c:\cygwin on the machine where
you're running setup.exe not what you've previously downloaded to the
package directory. Add to this the lack of an option to skip
previously downloaded packages when they're manually selected (or
auto-selected by the dependency management) and it's a problem if
you're using a single local package directory for several different
machines that have different package sets installed.

On a single machine where you download and immediately install only
what'll be used locally it can still be a problem for those on slow,
unreliable or time-limited connections.

For example, many people in the UK use a 56kbps (or more usually
around 45kbps) connection. Many unmetered ISP packages disconnect
every two hours to prevent users hogging dial-in capacity they're not
using.

Downloading even a basic package with all its dependencies can run
over this time limit so you can't use the "install from Internet"
option.

But when you try to use "download from Internet" and then re-start
setup.exe after re-connecting it doesn't show you the packages you
already have. Worse, when you select your package again it
auto-selects all the dependencies and tries to download them all again
and so will never complete because you'll keep hitting the disconnect
timeout.

What you have to do is have an Explorer window open looking at the
package directory and manually go back and de-select all the ones
you've already got after auto-select has added them. This is prone to
error, especially if you've not used clean_setup.pl to flatten the
structure between each download session. It's also annoying because it
should be easy to automate into setup.exe itself.

> Maybe we should dump the "Download" option entirely.  Seems that all it serves
> to do is confuse people that should really be looking at rsync.

Please, no!

Apart from the reason I give above, on my main machine here I always
download first in my normal NT user account so I can continue to work
while it's going on. I then log in as ADMINISTRATOR to install because
I have the Cygwin directory hierarchy protected against write by
normal users. That way I'm running with potentially dangerous
privileges for as short a time as possible.

-- 
Sam Edge

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