Mailing-List: contact cygwin-apps-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
Sender: cygwin-apps-owner AT cygwin DOT com
List-Subscribe: <mailto:cygwin-apps-subscribe AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Archive: <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin-apps/>
List-Post: <mailto:cygwin-apps AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Help: <mailto:cygwin-apps-help AT cygwin DOT com>, <http://sources.redhat.com/lists.html#faqs>
Mail-Followup-To: cygwin-apps AT cygwin DOT com
Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin-apps AT cygwin DOT com
Message-ID: <3CB395E5.7070002@ece.gatech.edu>
Date: Tue, 09 Apr 2002 21:31:17 -0400
From: Charles Wilson <cwilson AT ece DOT gatech DOT edu>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011019 Netscape6/6.2
X-Accept-Language: en-us
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: cygwin-apps AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Now that the new setup is here...
References: <FC169E059D1A0442A04C40F86D9BA76008AC93 AT itdomain003 DOT itdomain DOT net DOT au> <20020410001021 DOT GA23551 AT redhat DOT com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Christopher Faylor wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 10:05:19AM +1000, Robert Collins wrote:
> 
>>>But those are social problems, not technical ones.
>>>
>>And ones I have little sympathy for. Setup is a technical tool, not a
>>social one. It's not aimed at being the best downloader, only the best
>>installer. Mirroring that handles directory relocation is a sitecopy
>>style task...
>>
> 
> I'm not sure what reorg you were talking about but I've abandoned one
> of my plans to move everything into directories named after category
> names.  That seemed like a lot of work for nothing.


That was the one to which I was referring.

 
> The only thing I can think of to do is to get rid of latest/contrib and
> move to something else, like 'release', with all of the current
> directories located underneath.


You mean like:
   cygwin/latest/zlib    --->  cygwin/release/zlib
   cygwin/contrib/libpng --->  cygwin/release/libpng
   cygwin/xfree86/*      --->  cygwin/release/xfree86/
?

FWIW, I like this -- provided it won't cause problems...


> AFAIK, this won't cause any undue download activity will it?


It will cause dumb mirroring tools (that cannot handle dir moves) to 
download all of the stuff from the new location.  Wget, for instance, 
but probably also some of the official mirrors may hammer sourceware.

Now, as far as setup doing unnecessary downloads merely because the dirs 
changed; no, I doubt it.  But Robert can answer that question better than I.

 
> Regardless, I'm with Robert.  setup was never designed to be a mirroring
> tool or a site deployment tool.  If people are relying on a particular
> directory arrangement then, er, tough...


Agreed.  I have a pretty clever (IMHO; although, being based on wget it 
qualifies as "dumb" according to the definition above) wrapper around 
wget that I use to mirror the cygwin dist; I wonder if it would be 
useful to provide that somewhere (cgf's magic script area in the 
repository?  Some other "random useful stuff here" repository?).  Then, 
when people complain about setup, we say

   "Here.  Go use THIS tool, HERE, and don't try to fit the (setup) 
round peg into the (mirroring) square hole"

instead of

   "Setup isn't a mirroring tool.  Go away and use something else. 
Anything else."

.....OR......

does sourceware (or any of the official mirrors) provide anonymous 
rsync?  That'd be way better...

--Chuck