Date: Sun, 11 May 2008 19:00:38 +0200
From: Marc Weber <marco-oweber AT gmx DOT de>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: I'd like to add and mantain a new pacakge: nix
Message-ID: <20080511170038.GA17387@gmx.de>
References: <20080510142954 DOT GA20034 AT gmx DOT de> <48271071 DOT 1030807 AT veritech DOT com>
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On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 11:27:45AM -0400, Lee D. Rothstein wrote:
>  look at elements of your package components because I am curious
>  about being a Cygwin developer/maintainer, and I have been
>  struggling for some time to figure out how to improved Cygwin/GNU
>  documentation/help.
Interesting .. I've always found the information I was needing
(sometimes asking in chatrooms :)

>  With that fan-less-fare (;-)), I make the following observations:
> 
>  * The hint file is not complete and appears to be some kind of
>    gag?
Can you recommend me one which you find "complete" ?
I had a quick glance at some packages eg
ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/cygwin/release/cron/setup.hint
and they don't seem to contain much more information.
Can you point me to a "complete" one?

>   * It would be quite helpful, if there was a "NIX Intro" 'man' page
>    that gave the function of the package that I could only find
>    described in the Cygport file. 


 "(package manager allowing) multiple versions of a package to be installed side-by-side,
ensures that dependency specifications are complete, supports atomic
upgrades and rollbacks .."
Does it sound more descriptive after adding those words within () ?


>     page would also point out
>    the components of the package much the same way that 'man perl'
>    does, but on the relatively smaller scale of 'nix'.
Are you missing a small doc containing:
        nix
        ----------------
        <short description, eg first paragraph from http://nixos.org/about.html>


        list of binaries:
                nix-env : manages your local installation environments
                nix-collect-garbage : removes all files from store no longer referenced
                                 by any registered installation
                nix-build: tool to build derivations
                nix-instantiate: ...

>   * It would also be helpful, if the '.TH' description for each
>    man page was more functionally descriptive.
eg the vim.1.gz man file contains:
        .TH VIM 1 "2006 Apr 11"
        .SH NAME
        vim \- Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor
Both apropos and whatis shows the line after .SH NAME here.
This it's fine in my opinion.

>   * I believe that such changes would make your package more
>    accessible, and therefore more popular, but, as I've already
>    said, I'm unqualified to judge.
Mmh :) The poeple installing this package will know why they install
it.. at least at the moment I think.

>  (My personal belief is that 'info' causes cancer in chickens, and
>  no reason to involve these sacrificial birds in the GNUish
>  documentation wars. ;-) )
I enjoy info bash much more than man bash..
and i prefer info screen over man screen

>  Were you intending your package manager to be used for
>  maintaining parallel Cygwin 1.5/1.7 configurations?
I'd like to introduce you to my intensions:
I'm using cygwin (scp/ ssh) because I already know how to use them and
it just works. I've used sshd and The X server to connect to colinux
instance some time ago. I don't know much more about cygwin yet.
I'm using nix because it's a perfect tool to manage packages in a pure
way. The difference to debian is in sentence: Everyone can assemble
his/her own environment using the same sytem running different versions
of applications and using different libraries. The sytem can't break
because you can always rollback. (that's about nix and nixos).
There are some other features as well (binary diff distributions etc).
Those are the reasons why I'm using nix(os) as main operating system.
I've spend quite some time to add about 80 haskell packges to this
distribution system. Now I'd like to build and install them easily on
windows as well. Because nix is developped on linux cygwin is the
perfect base to make it run.
I'm not sure what you mean by maintaining a parallel Cygwin 1.5/1.7
configurations .. But nix itself could be used to build an alternative
to cygwin. I don't have the time to do this within the near future
(would be cool to have..)

The documentation doesn't build yet on windows. It can be found online
at nixos.org anyway. Do you think adding a link to nixos.org is enough
to enable people beeing interested finding the docs they are looking
for?

Anyway: Thank your for taking the time and giving me some feedback.

Marc Weber

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