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Message-ID: <436E891A.489A09B5@dessent.net>
Date: Sun, 06 Nov 2005 14:52:10 -0800
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: where is setup.exe source?
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Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com

Igor Pechtchanski wrote:

> Well, yes, if you put it that way.  However, there's a chicken-and-egg
> problem here, right?  As in "I want to download Cygwin fast" needs Cygwin
> to figure it out[*]?

Well, it's not hard to bootstrap yourself.  The base cygwin install is
currently 13.5MB to download, plus another 7.3MB if you want perl.  So,
even on a less than stellar mirror you should be able to get a working
Cygwin without having to wait terribly long, at which point you could
set out to find a better one.

But I agree that this misses the point.  It would be a nice feature to
have, and certainly would be welcomed by the users.  The problem of
course is that to do it well (not just a bunch of pings) takes some
design and thought, and most of all elbow grease.

Maybe a starting point would be a awk[1] script that lives in the
base-files package that grabs mirrors.lst and downloads some relatively
small package from every mirror, and generates a report.  That way, we
could at least say "try running mirror-check.awk" when users have
problems with mirrors, rather than just "play around until you find a
mirror you like."

Brian

[1] Written in awk (included in Base) so that there's no need to pull in
perl.  If I recall correctly GNU gawk has functions for doing TCP/IP
access.

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