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Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:05:21 +1100
From: Chris Cormie <cjcormie AT gmail DOT com>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Cygwin package manager
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 > On first look, it seems good.  Would you consider packaging it as a 
Cygwin
 > package?  You'd get more people using it that way.
 >
 > If you haven't maintained a Cygwin package before, it wouldn't be 
much work
 > to get this one going, since it's so simple.  I don't think I'd want to
 > maintain it, but I'd be glad to help with the initial packaging.

Thanks for the offer. I'd like to offer it as a package but I have a 
question: how stringent is the package submission process? This is an 
initial release and will have bugs to iron out. Is there a 
minimum-maturity requirement for packages?

 > It needs a man page.  Just a simple one that regurgitates the help text
 > would be a place to start, and you could add to it later as time 
permitted.

Definitely part of a good package. For now there is the wiki:
http://code.google.com/p/cyg-apt/w/list

 > I know that setup.exe has command-line functionality, but I've never used
 > it much so I don't know how it compares to cyg-apt.

The command line functionality of setup.exe is minimal: it allows you to 
install individual packages. That said, that's a core use case and 
setup.exe is the official installer.

 >  A full-featured
 > command line package manager would be good to have in Cygwin.  As one
 > example, I'm considering packaging Puppet for Cygwin, and one of the 
things
 > that would need to be added is a package management layer.  For that we'd
 > need a suitable command-line package manager, whether it's setup.exe or
 > cyg-apt.

I'd wait for cyg-apt to mature a bit before deploying it in an automated 
context. If you only need to install specific packages my instinct is to 
go with setup.exe though I haven't tested it myself. I do note that it 
pops up a window while it is working.

If you do wish to experiment with using cyg-apt's wider functionality in 
an automated context my first thoughts are:

* run cyg-apt from Windows, rather than inside Cygwin to reduce the 
number of packages cyg-apt can't manipulate to the bare minimum (cygwin, 
coreutils). See the wiki for more info.

* What would be the scope of which packages are manipulated? Essentially 
cyg-apt adds packages to installed.db and performs automated tarball 
downloads and unpacks, then runs the package scripts. I'm not sure if 
the core packages have requirements in addition to "civilian" packages. 
If you are confident with core packages, cyg-apt can be hacked to 
manipulate all packages from Windows with relatively little effort.

Cheers,
Chris

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