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Message-ID: <435D743F.EDB6FBB9@dessent.net>
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 16:54:39 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: cygwin-setup & rebaseall
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Satish Balay wrote:

> Q: Does cygwin setup run rebaseall either during initial install or
> during subsequent updates? [guessing no]

No, setup has no clue about rebaseall.

> Q: Is it safe to say: 'if cygwin is installed from scratch - rebaseall
> is not required'

That's not quite correct.  Whether a rebase is required depends on
several factors - which packages you've selected, and whether those
packages have been compiled with --enable-auto-image-base.  As you have
noted, the rebase is only required for certain packages, particularly
those that use dynamically loaded modules such as python or perl.  Many
people use Cygwin all the time and never run into the problem because
most programs don't suffer from this.

Additionally, maintainers of these packages have (I believe) recently
started compiling them with --enable-auto-image-base which should
eliminate (or reduce) the need to rebase.

> [for our tools] cygwin/python is a pre-requisite - and our users
> appear to stumble across this issue regularly. And asking users to
> always run rebaseall is an extra hurdle]

Always running rebase after any setup operation seems like overkill.  It
should only be necessary if you upgrade python or a dynamic library that
python might load at runtime, and then only if python wasn't compiled
with the above flag -- I don't know the current status of which
maintainers are doing that.

So, it seems to me like it would be a lot easier just to say "Run rebase
if you get an "Unable to remap" error" instead of "Run rebase
religiously after any setup operation."  Or, if you know that python
triggers this problem then perhaps it should be, "Always run rebaseall
after a clean install, and then don't worry about it again unless you
get the "unable to remap" error."

Brian

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