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Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:34:36 -0500
Message-ID: <183c528b0902121134m1932abcw6819daf732e03124@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: CygWine 1.0 Beta -- an new cygwin package manager
From: Brian Mathis <brian DOT mathis AT gmail DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
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As a layman (not a cygwin developer or anything), I have to say this
looks really great.  The current setup.exe program is certainly (and
almost exclusively) _functional_, this kind of UI is really the next
step.

One thing that could use a major rethink, and seems to be carried over
from the current setup.exe, is the need to right-click to "Mark for
installation", "...reinstallation", etc...  The handling of what to
install, upgrade, or remove is probably one of the biggest issues with
the current setup.exe, and is one of the main parts that could use
some UI brainstorming.

I suggest 3 tabs in the main package information window, for
"Available", "Installed", and "Updates".  The "available" tab would
list packages that are not installed, "installed" would list installed
packages, and "updates" would list packages that have newer versions
available.  Each listing would have a column with checkboxes for each
package, that allows the user to select packages to install, remove,
or update, on each tab.

I see you have something along these lines in the "Packages" section,
but those seelctions seem to muddy the purpose of that panel.

If it were really necessary, a forth tab could be included that shows
a queue of the things that will be done, like installing, updating,
removing, and the apply button might even be on that tab.  I might be
able to mock something up if GIMP weren't so infuriatingly hard to
use.

I was also thrown by the inclusion of "Wine" in the name.  I'm not
familiar with Wine, but the project tagline "make Cygwin like Wine"
doesn't make sense to me.  Maybe this has a similar UI to the Wine
*installer*?  If that's the case, I'm not sure that the interface of
an installer should be considered as equivalent to the entire package,
and in any case is confusing in this context.

Anyway, it looks like really good work!


On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Brant Young <yospaly AT gmail DOT com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have launched a opensource project -- CygWine ( a cygwin package
> management utility, project homepage: http://cygwine.googlecode.com )
>
> CygWine 1.0 beta was just released, you can download the executable
> and browse screenshots at http://cygwine.googlecode.com.
>
> Compared to cygwin official install tool -- setup.exe, CygWine is more
> easy to use, has more intuitive UI.
>
> Currently, some of setup.exe features not supported by CygWine, I will
> add more functions in the next release.
>
> I hope you will like it, suggestions and contributions are welcome.
>
> Regards,
>
> Yospaly
>

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