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Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 08:16:52 -0800
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: Randall R Schulz <rrschulz AT cris DOT com>
Subject: Re: Installing cygwin NOT from web
In-Reply-To: <3E7892D3.6060602@fgm.com>
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Daniel,

At 07:54 2003-03-19, Daniel Barclay wrote:
>Max Bowsher wrote:
>>Charles D. Russell wrote:
>>...
>>>1) setup.exe is really designed to work best for direct installation
>>>from the web, so do that first on some computer with an internet
>>>connection. 2) when you install from the web, copies of all the
>>>downloaded files - including setup.exe - are retained in a directory
>>>that you can specify. After completing the installation, if you burn
>>>that directory to a CD, you have everything you need to reinstall to
>>>that or another computer.
>>>...
>>
>>Mostly right - but there is no need to actually install Cygwin on your
>>downloading computer.
>
>But why do you have to be running Windows to _download_ CygWin?
>
>Why can't you download the files using any FTP/HTTP client and operating
>system you want, transfer the files (or otherwise make them visible) to a
>Windows system, and only then use setup.exe to install the files from the
>Windows-visible directory?

This is quite feasible, but a simple local mirror of the Cygwin 
distribution or any valid subset thereof (itself obtained from one of 
the public mirror sites, of course) will not be suitable for use by 
Setup.exe. There needs to be a renaming applied between the mirror host 
and the local mirror.

Search the Cygwin archives for the subject "setup.exe joblist for 
downloading" for a simpleminded script, "mkcygwget," that will produce 
a comprehensive (*) wget script. Look also for messages that mention 
"clean_setup.pl" for a more sophisticated alternative.

(*) Comprehensive here is not a good thing. It will download every 
package (current, previous and experimental, if they exist) including 
its source, if any. This is almost always insufficiently selective. 
Refinement is left as an exercise for the motivated. If you do enhance, 
it, I'd appreciate your sharing it with me (I wrote mkcygwget) and the 
rest of us.

Both of these scripts require more than Windows (BASH or Perl, resp., 
at the very minimum) but should be useful (possibly requiring 
modification) on a Unix system.


>One might want to download once to a local mirror and then install on
>multiple machines.

Commonly done.

Still, Setup.exe is the best (certainly the easiest) way to acquire the 
local mirror from which you'll install (via local network share or a CD 
burned from what Setup.exe downloads).


>In my case,  I dual-boot Linux and Windows, running Linux most of the time,
>and have a slow network connection.  I would want to download to a local
>mirror in the background (while doing whatever else I'm doing while booted
>in Linux), and then boot into Windows to install.

If you're in the money, consider VMware (more than 512 MB RAM suggested 
and single-user non-educational licenses cost $300).


>Organizations that provide network installers usually also provide separately
>downloadable versions (witness Netscape, Mozilla (I think), Microsoft Windows
>service packs, Debian GNU/Linux).  Could Cygwin follow suit sometime?

If you mean will the Cygwin team produce monolithic installers, that's 
very unlikely. The package set changes far too often to keep creating 
unified release packages each of which would be is the a half gigabyte in size.

The analogy with your examples is poor, since they are mostly smaller 
(Mozilla) and uniformly less frequently updated. Even if you consider a 
Linux distribution, it, too, does not produce full releases when 
individual packages within it are updated.

But if you want to create such a thing, you could do so. Pick your 
favorite language (C / C++, shell, Perl, Python, Java are all viable 
candidates) and start writing. I'm being glib, of course, but then 
again as the aforementioned BASH and Perl scripts show, it's not that 
hard, either.


>Daniel


Randall Schulz 


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