Subject: Re: cygwin installer
From: Robert Collins <[email-masked]>
To: Jonah Bossewitch <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 12:56:50 +1000

On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 23:55, Jonah Bossewitch wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was hoping that someone might be able to point me in the direction of 
> some documentation for creating a standalone windows installer for a 
> cygwin based application.
> 
> What I mean by this, is a one-click installer that ships with the cygwin 
> dlls, and all the necessary dependancies, along with the application 
> that we are porting. So, if a user doesn't have cygwin, they don't need 
> to install it separately first.  I understand that people with cygwin 
> already installed may need to download a separate binary since the 
> installer might mess up their existing installation.

It's more that third party installers have a nasty habit of not a)
keeping up with changes in the cygwin environment, and b) not being
compatible with the cygwin setup.exe. (Which is pretty simple to do).

So, if you want to create this, you'll need a fork setup's code, remove
all the screens asking users things, and have a precanned list of
repositories it installs from, and of packages it requires. Done
carefully, this won't stuff up cygwin installs at all. You will need to
keep this up to date with any changes we make, or else you may start to
cause problems in the future.

Rob
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