Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Message-ID: <037401c2d47d$a3238610$ab7886d9@webdev> Reply-To: "Elfyn McBratney" From: "Elfyn McBratney" To: "cygwin" References: <20030214182615 DOT GA20996 AT redhat DOT com> <20030214205048 DOT GA62525 AT ozzmosis DOT com> <20030214215957 DOT GD11760 AT redhat DOT com> <20030214225534 DOT GA63773 AT ozzmosis DOT com> Subject: Re: Why the rash of people bypassing setup.exe to install? Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 23:05:58 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106 > 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. WinRAR has this ability. > 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. :-) Regards, Elfyn McBratney elfyn AT exposure DOT org DOT uk www.exposure.org.uk -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/