Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 12:43:59 -0500
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Recent upgrade to wish leads to a problem
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On Fri, Mar 02, 2012 at 01:11:49AM -0600, Robert Miles wrote:
>On 3/1/2012 1:38 PM, Jeremy Bopp wrote:
>> On 03/01/2012 01:05 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
>>> On 03/01/2012 10:53 AM, Matt Seitz (matseitz) wrote:
>>>> You don't think that Setup telling the user "package xyz requires
>>>> package xinit" might at least tip off some users that running xyz now
>>>> requires starting an X server?
>>>>
>>>> Even if it doesn't reduce the questions, would it at least reduce the
>>>> problem of users now having to run Setup a second time to download and
>>>> install the xinit package?
>>> While I can't control whether Yaakov adds xinit as a dependency to
>>> tcl-tk, I personally wouldn't mind adding xinit as a prereq to gitk and
>>> git-gui, since I maintain that package.  There's still that annoyance
>>> factor that just depending on xinit won't get X running, but at least it
>>> will let you download all the bits in one run of setup.exe instead of
>>> hitting the FAQ and finding out you have to rerun setup.exe.
>> I don't think I've ever seen it, but does setup.exe support the notion
>> of recommended and/or suggested packages?
>>
>> It seems that the main issue is that xinit is not a hard dependency of
>> these tools/libraries and thus they should not have a hard dependency on
>> xinit defined in the package definition.  However, it might make sense
>> to make xinit a recommended dependency that setup.exe could offer to
>> install by default or at least notify the user that they may want to
>> install.
>
>I suspect not, but I would like to see such recommended and/or
>suggested packages.  Back when I was using Cygwin gcc so I could learn
>C, m4 was not installed along with it, and I believe that m4 should at
>least be shown as a recommended package to go along with gcc.

There is no reason to include m4 as a gcc dependency if you are trying
to learn C.  This would not even be a case of a suggestion.  If you
needed m4 for some reason (maybe for autoconf/automake) that really
would be a case where you need to install m4 separately.  You can use
gcc quite happily without having m4 installed.

For the record, I don't think Yaakov, Corinna, or I are really
interested in spending our time adding some sort of suggestion mechanism
to setup.exe.  This would have ramifications both for setup.exe, for the
script which updates setup.ini, and for the genini script.  It would
likely be a fair amount of work.

Given the fact that this has come up repeatedly over the years I am
pretty sure that repeated suggestions that setup.exe should be modified
to do this are likely not going to have any effect.

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