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Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2003 09:55:35 +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: <20030214225534.GA63773@ozzmosis.com>
References: <20030214182615 DOT GA20996 AT redhat DOT com> <20030214205048 DOT GA62525 AT ozzmosis DOT com> <20030214215957 DOT GD11760 AT redhat DOT com>
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On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 04:59:57PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> 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.

Then the problem may be due to nontechnical people thinking they know
what they're doing.  ;-)

> >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.
> 
> Again, if you're nontechnical why would you draw the conclusion "They didn't
> tell me why, so it must be ok"?  And, even if you did come to that conclusion,
> wouldn't it make sense to *try* setup.exe when the download/untar combination
> obviously doesn't work?

There may be some sort of "it worked once with package XYZ, so it should
work with package ABC too" mentality going on.

> That's a viable theory.  This could well be.  However, it doesn't explain
> an increase in this behavior unless cygwin has just become more popular
> and the 1% of people who decide not to use setup.exe have just become
> 1% of a larger number.

Quite likely.

> >Then there are the numerous issues with the UI of the Setup program
> >itself which no doubt dissuade people from using it.
> 
> I suppose so, but, again, it seems like many people *recently* are unaware
> of the setup program entirely.

So what are these people using to extract the package contents?  AFAIK
WinZip doesn't support bzip2, so something tells me they must've used
Setup at least once just to install Cygwin's bzip2 package, unless they
went to a bit of effort to find a non-Cygwin bzip2 decompressor, then
open the .tar with WinZip.

Hmm, actually, the first hit for bzip2 on Google leads to
http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2/ where there is a non-Cygwin Win32 version
of bzip2 just a page down, which I find is a little ironic, but probably
little more than coincidence.  :-)

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