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Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 19:04:56 +0100
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: Frank Stajano <fms27 AT cam DOT ac DOT uk>
Subject: installation problem SOLVED
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.1.20030824143837.030aa830@localhost>
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This is a follow-up to my own installation problem as reported in
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2003-08/msg01255.html
to which no reply appeared here yet.

After a lot of attempts and a lot of persistence I discovered that the 
reason for all the strange behaviour was that some of the tarballs in the 
installation directory were missing.

So I went online again (at the office---I was doing an offline installation 
at home, where I only had a modem, so I didn't want to download 100s of MB 
that way) and fetched the stuff from zero into a new directory.

***And it was still incomplete!*** The problem is with the mirror, 
ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk , because when I downloaded "everything" from it I 
got 125 MB, 117 files, 131 folders whereas when I downloaded everything 
from http://mirrors.sunsite.dk I got 198 MB, 149 files, 155 folders. Now, I 
can't say for sure that this second download isn't also missing something, 
but the first one certainly was.

My humble suggestion would be to add some kind of self check on what's 
there (e.g. a packing list, maybe just the setup.ini, with its MD5 hash) so 
that the setup program could ask the mirror "what are you giving me?" "the 
list of packages as of 2003-08-28" and the setup program could easily check 
if any are missing, in which case it might recommend another mirror.

I wasted a lot of time on this because I axiomatically assumed that the 
stuff I downloaded was complete and self-consistent, so I believe that a 
self-check at this level would be very useful.

It appears that in my case setup didn't bat an eyelash about the fact that 
setup.ini listed some files that the mirror was not actually supplying for 
download. I would have expected and welcomed a warning. Same applies to an 
install from the local directory, of course.

   Frank (filologo disneyano) http://www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/~fms27/


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