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Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 23:19:23 -0800 (PST)
From: "Peter A. Castro" <doctor AT fruitbat DOT org>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Cygwin Time Machine
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0501222233240.16726@ming.fruitbat.org>
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I'm probably going to regret this :)

For some time, I've been keeping a private mirror of Cygwin for my own
personal use.  Unlike other mirrors, I've been keeping all of the
versions of all packages, along with a revision of setup.ini to go with
it.

Now, call me crazy (and I know you already do :), but since Cygwin Setup
uses nothing more than setup.ini and the release/ directory, I thought:
"why not provide a historical representation of Cygwin's package from
which you can actually install from"?  Think of it as a time machine for
going back to a previous "version" of Cygwin.  And so, that's what I did.

See  http://www.fruitbat.org/Cygwin/index.html#cygwincirca

This provides the details of how it works.  Basically, it's a bunch of
timestamp based URLs which allow you to install a specific snapshot of
Cygwin.

So, why am I doing this?  Well, I actually have need of this for work.
It saved me much time and effort, because I could install additional
packages at the same level of what we already had installed, thus
introducing less instability into our environments, and it gives us a
chance to gradually upgrade.  It's a cop-out, I know, and I can already
see people tut-tut'ing at this, but on the plus side, it's kind of neat
to see a form of historical review of Cygwin packages.  My mirroring is
done automatically each day, and the time machine is also automatically
regenerated along with it to keep it up to date.

I really only did this for my work, but thought perhaps someone else
might find it useful or interesting.  Unfortinately, it only goes back to
April of 2002, though I actually have package versions going back
further, but not the setup.ini to go with them.  Once our work has
migrated to a more current Cygwin, I might remove this, but for now it's
useful to me.

-- 
Peter A. Castro <doctor AT fruitbat DOT org> or <Peter DOT Castro AT oracle DOT com>
	"Cats are just autistic Dogs" -- Dr. Tony Attwood

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