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Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 14:21:18 -0800
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: Randall R Schulz <rrschulz AT cris DOT com>
Subject: Re: Why the rash of people bypassing setup.exe to install?
In-Reply-To: <20030214215957.GD11760@redhat.com>
References: <20030214205048 DOT GA62525 AT ozzmosis DOT com>
 <20030214182615 DOT GA20996 AT redhat DOT com>
 <20030214205048 DOT GA62525 AT ozzmosis DOT com>
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Chris,

At 13:59 2003-02-14, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 07:50:48AM +1100, andrew clarke wrote:
> >On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 01:26:15PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >
> >> ...
> >
> >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.

Maybe a new naming convention might serve to deter the naive: 
PackageName-versionOrDateTag.car ("Cygwin ARchive"). It would still be 
a BZip2-compressed TAR file, just as Java's ".jar" files are PKZIP 
files under a different name (and with some extra content structuring 
conventions).

While the uninitiated will think these files are something special and 
unique to Cygwin's installer, they will still be amenable to processing 
using the usual tools and all the same code will continue to work as it 
did before (with the possible exception of a minor change to Setup to 
know what ".car" means).

I make this suggestion about 50/50 serious / tongue-in-cheek.


>If you are a nontechnical cygwin user, then why would you be making
>any determination of what is harmless or not harmless?  I would think
>that it would be the reverse -- people who really know what they're
>doing (or think they know what they're doing) would be untarring.
>
> >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.
>
>...
>
>cgf


Randall Schulz 


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