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Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2003 07:50:48 +1100
From: andrew clarke <mail AT ozzmosis DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Why the rash of people bypassing setup.exe to install?
Message-ID: <20030214205048.GA62525@ozzmosis.com>
References: <20030214182615 DOT GA20996 AT redhat DOT com>
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On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 01:26:15PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> I tried an experiment recently where I turned on ftp access to the
> cygwin download directory on sources.redhat.com.  The result seemed
> to be that people started downloading cygwin's package .tar.bz2 files
> directly and (somehow) used tar to extract files rather than running
> setup.exe.

If I may, speaking on behalf of some of the less-technical Cygwin users,
some points:

Obviously for simple .tar.bz2 files without any dependencies or post-
install scripts, etc, untarring would appear to users to be a harmless
thing to do.

I suspect people aren't reading the notes near the bottom of
http://www.cygwin.com/download.html, or if they are, they don't believe
what they read, notably the "Installing Cygwin using this method [untar]
is not recommended." bit, because there's no explanation as to why
it's not recommended.

Section 2 of the FAQ might also put people off using Setup because it's
described as a "work-in-progress" and seemingly a bit of a moving target.

Also, people may be put off by the fact that there's no recommended
way (to my knowledge) to install Cygwin packages from the command-line,
(a la "apt-get", "pkg_add", "rpm -i", etc).

Also, it may be that Setup is failing (eg. aborted downloads) for one
reason or another, for more people than you think, so people are resorting
to using Wget, or their browser, or something.

Then there are the numerous issues with the UI of the Setup program
itself which no doubt dissuade people from using it.

All these things combined can't really help much.

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