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Date: 17 Nov 2001 21:56:05 -0500
Message-ID: <20011118025605.17324.qmail@lizard.curl.com>
From: Jonathan Kamens <jik AT curl DOT com>
To: cygwin-apps AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Non-intuitive setup.exe behavior -- downloading is affected
   by what's installed?

I keep a full mirror of all the current Cygwin packages locally, even
though we don't actually install all of them locally on our machines.
In the past, I have done that simply by running setup.exe and telling
it to download into my local mirror directory -- it would tell me
which old packages have been updated or new packages have been created
and need to be downloaded.

However, when the new version of setup.exe is downloading into a local
directory, it apparently by default skips packages that are not
already installed on the local machine.  For example, when I ran it
tonight, it decided to skip indent, since of course I don't have
indent installed locally since I've never installed it before.
Similarly, it's telling me that it's skipping the download of "cvs"
since I don't have it installed.

I understand that in the new setup.exe, some packages aren't installed
by default.  However, it seems to me that when downloading into a
local directory, the deciding factor when determining whether to
download a package should be whether it has been downloaded in the
past, i.e., whether there is a version fo that package in the
directory into which downloading should take place.  I'm not sure what
the default should be for a newly created package, but I personally
would prefer for the default to be to download such packages.

Of course, I can work around this problem -- I'll just use wget or
mirror to mirror the whole tree from one of the Cygwin mirrors instead
of downloading it with setup.exe.  But I just wanted to comment that
the current behavior of setup.exe doesn't seem fully intuitive.

Note, however, that it's obvious that a lot of work has gone into the
new interface and functionality, and overall, I like it a lot.
Thanks!

  Jonathan Kamens