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content-class: urn:content-classes:message
Subject: RE: setup wishes -- any volunteers
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Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2001 10:09:11 +1100
Message-ID: <EA18B9FA0FE4194AA2B4CDB91F73C0EF79AB@itdomain002.itdomain.net.au>
Thread-Topic: setup wishes -- any volunteers
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From: "Robert Collins" <robert DOT collins AT itdomain DOT com DOT au>
To: <cygwin-apps AT cygwin DOT com>, <cygwin-developers AT cygwin DOT com>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Christopher Faylor [mailto:cgf AT redhat DOT com]
> Sent: Friday, March 23, 2001 9:52 AM
> To: cygwin-apps AT cygwin DOT com; cygwin-developers AT cygwin DOT com
> Subject: Re: setup wishes -- any volunteers
> 
> 
> On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 09:27:08AM +1100, Robert Collins wrote:
> >I know this has been said before, but what about leveraging of an
> >existing packaging format - dpkg has all the capabilities 
> you cite, and
> >they had a win32 project in place at one time. I'mm willing 
> to polish my
> >elbows this weekend and see if I can make something work : 
> but first I
> >would like a little buy-in that this is a good route to take.
> 
> This gives you dependencies but I don't see that it provides you with
> anything else.

the debian format does nested dependencies based on features (ie vi
requires curses, curses is supplied by ncurses, multi sources of
features - ncurses provides termcap, as does terminfo (yes I know these
aren't accurate :]). It has _many_ existing retrieval tools & formats
(http/ftp/file system/nfs/even rsync I think) and a build environment to
build the packages. (Oh, and a pretty wide volunteer developer base for
the format, so no commercial realities should intrude :]) [just ignoring
_my_ day job for a moment, which is not cygwin related...]
 
> You'd have to build a non-cygwin version of rpm to handle all of this.
> I don't know how feasible that would be.

It's not RPM. It's not a religious preference, but IMO the dpkg format
is much more flexible than rpm...
 
> It wouldn't be politically expedient for me to say no to RPM, 
> of course.
> If you can come up with a plan to use it, I'd be interested.
> 
> I think this is the way I answered the last time this question was
> raised.  At least I hope I did.
> 
> cgf

Something similar for sure. Ok here's my plan

target 1) setup.exe can read and install (possibly via bootstrapping) a
dpkg package.
target 2) setup.exe can check dependecies on a dpkg package.
target 3) "workstation" "developer" "server" "everything" install sets.
target 4) make it pretty *

Rob

* I don't care about this bit. It's not terribly important. Ease of use
& reliability are important.