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Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 13:05:43 -0400 (EDT)
From: Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu>
Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
To: Alexander Colesnicov <kae AT math DOT md>
cc: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Installation hangs because asks for input from terminal (Attn: tetex maintainer, setup maintainer)
In-Reply-To: <41416E12.30103@math.md>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.61.0409101300420.5749@slinky.cs.nyu.edu>
References: <41416E12 DOT 30103 AT math DOT md>
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On Fri, 10 Sep 2004, Alexander Colesnicov wrote:

> Dear Sir/Madam,
>
> I tried to install cygwin and it hanged when executing
> /etc/postinstall/post-texmf.sh . To proceed further, I marked this
> script as "done" and all the rest was OK. Then I started cygwin and run
> this script manually. I found that it was a conflict with my existing
> fpTeX installation (fpTeX is a TeTeX port to Windows) that defined an
> environment variable TEXMFCNF to one of Windows directories. The script
> post-texmf.sh diagnosted that and asked for user's reaction. I redefined
> the variable in my .bashrc as TEXMFCNF="/usr/share/texmf/web2c:", and
> the script run. The bad thing is that the terminal window does not exist
> during setup.exe run. Therefore, the user can not react to script's
> questions. My recommedation is to reprogram post-texmf.sh in such a
> manner that it will never ask for user's intervention, and will set the
> TEXMFCNF variable uncoditionally to its true value to avoid the
> described conflict.

This is a bug -- postinstall scripts should *not* be interactive, and
certainly not via the TUI (since their output is not seen by the user
while installing).  Thanks for reporting it.

As I see it, there are two places where this should be fixed:
- setup.exe should run postinstall scripts with stdin redirected from
  /dev/null or equivalent (so that errant scripts don't hang the install)
- the postinstall scripts themselves should have reasonable defaults on
  encountering EOF in the input (as a consequence of the first fix).

Hope this helps,
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_		pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		igor AT watson DOT ibm DOT com
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski, Ph.D.
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

"Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing
whatever you think is worth doing."  -- Dr. Jubal Harshaw

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