Mailing-List: contact cygwin-apps-help AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com; run by ezmlm
Sender: cygwin-apps-owner AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com
Message-ID: <041901c16b05$377de2d0$0200a8c0@lifelesswks>
From: "Robert Collins" <robert DOT collins AT itdomain DOT com DOT au>
To: <cygwin-apps AT sources DOT redhat DOT com>
Subject: Wishlist & TODO's for setup.exe
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 10:04:28 +1100
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Ok,

over the last week, there have been quite a few wishs' expressed about
setup.exe.

I'm not interested in implementing them all myself, and some are non
trivial given the current state.

I'm not terribly interested in maintaining a web page listing all the
'wanted' features - but I'm happy to do so if there would be folk
hacking as a result of such a page existing (and being kept up to date
:]).

Anyone who wants to help, is welcome to join in. New work is going onto
HEAD only (IOW, it's not being backported to the current live setup, or
the now in maintenance mode categories setup.) For major tasks if you
have write access at sources.redhat.com, a CVS branch may be
preferrable. If you don't have write access and want to work on
something major.... have a chat to Chris on this list.

Lastly, I expect HEAD to get broken from time to time, and as the live
setup on cygwin.com should never be the HEAD branch, that's ok, but I'd
like to see no more than a month go by without everything being stable
enough that any new features can be tagged and put onto cygwin.com.

If I've missed anything in the lists below, please let me know.

Rob

The current items I have recorded are:
TODO:
* Src tickbox /source only can be confusing.
* file magic detection.
* support rpm/deb files for reading the package from. (To allow the
maintainers the use of rpm/deb tools to create packages.)
* make a librar(y|ies) for setup and cygcheck to use containing
1) Something to translate POSIX -> native.  Currently called "cygpath"
   in setup, although this is probably a bad choice of name.
2) Something to return the list of installed packages.
3) Something to return the cygwin mount table.  Currently, I have
implemented
   a lightweight setmntent and getmntent using the code in
4) Something to parse a tar file name into package/version or
altenatively,
   return that information from 2)
5) Something to return a list of files associated with a package.


WISHLIST:
* Mouse wheel support broken/missing for *some* users.
* When in category view, and changing from prev->normal->exp the
categories get collapsed This is non-intuitive.
* mirrors.lst to be copied to setup.ini and cached locally. Then the
master mirrors list is reserved for bootstrapping.
* clicking on a package that is in multiple categories should update the
view of the package in both locations on screen.
* view button is not clear at first view. (the dotted highlight).
* remember the view mode - ie if you leave setup in partial, it returns
to partial automatically.
* new view - "action / category / package"
* Downloading from the internet should allow redownloading already
present files. (This happens via the reinstall/redo already - perhaps
this is "done".)
* Downloading from the internet should be _able_ to list based on what
is present in the cache, as opposed to what is installed. (To help
building a complete install set for a different machine).
* new view - show installed packages only. Probably not categorised.
* multiple mirror support, with setup.ini from each merged
automagically.

recently completed
* installed packages aren't automatically upgraded.
* Dependencies should not trigger alterations to user actions for
installed packages that have any action other than uninstall.
* Wide descriptions can get truncated - ie SSMTP
* SKIP and KEEP sometimes appearing for the same package.
* Set the screen size for 640x480 users
* View mdoe caption on the right hand of the screen