Subject: Re: cygwin and windows registry
From: <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 13:46:29 +0100

> ... is there a method to make cygwin portable?
> ... to make it so that it doesn't write to the registry?

If you have one directory containing two files, being cygwin1.dll and a
single Cygwin executable, then running that executable will write to the
registry. (Try it on a clean -- or cleaned -- machine with ls, for instance,
or md5sum or ddate or anything you like. Then run regedit and look for the
string "cyg".) So whatever you invent, and however sparse, this will happen.
It's not really a problem.

There's a recent discussion "Portable Cygwin on a CD" on the list. Depending
on the complexity of your requirements, you might need just some executables
and dll's: in which case, just store them and use them. Or, because of
dependencies and lurking relative paths etc in what you do, you might find
you need to mimic the conventional architecture /bin, /etc, /usr, ... under
g:\. If you do this then you should be able simply to walk up to a vacant
PC, mount your CD at the start (g:\bin\mount -bfu g:/ /) umount it at the
end (g:\bin\umount -A) and walk away again.

I do that round here the whole time. Nobody wants my stuff on their machine,
and nor do I want them to have it. But it is convenient to work with them,
at their machine. If it happens to be a Cygwin machine, then you'll not only
want your mount point to be temporary, but probably to recover theirs after
it's all over. Potentially awkward, but there's something about this in the
thread.

Fergus

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