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RE: Upgrade woes.


Larry Hall wrote:
>Back, Michael wrote:
>> Christopher Faylor did utter a clarion call of great frustration unto the
>heavens:
>>> On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 03:16:05PM -0800, Back, Michael wrote:
>>>> Chuck wrote:
>>>>> I think the frustration on some people's behalf is that this question
>>>>> has been asked (and answered) maybe 50 times already on the list.
>>>> Perhaps because people can't find the info.  they need in any other way
>>>> than posting to this list?
>>> You seem to be missing the point that if it was discussed in the list
>>> you can use the list archive as a resource.  You don't have to just
>>> blindly send email assuming that no one else would ever have asked the
>>> same question.
>> 
>> My point is that relying on a user to have the forethought, time, and
>> patience to scour through a mailing list archive is probably not the most
>> effective or convenient form of communicating common upgrade problems and
>> solutions.
>
>Probably not surprisingly, this idea is not new.  It's been discussed
>before and only remains as a topic for discussion because of a lack of
>resources to help make the situation better.  If anyone would like to
>research, monitor, and dig in to help make the documentation or
>install tools better and more helpful, I expect that would be welcome.
>Keep in mind that where Cygwin/X is concerned, there has been no
>maintainer for _years_ so I think we can all anticipate the amount of
>work to get all the packages upgraded, documented, and spiffy is
>significant.  And there will be some bumps along the way...

I don't know if it helps but I might add that the new maintainer didn't just
get a wild hair and create this situation. X11 was changed upstream some
time ago and because Cygwin had no maintainer we drifted out of sync with
the most up to date X11. We may actually be a little lucky that we didn't
have a maintainer because it kept us off the bleeding edge. My point is that
this isn't just a big Cygwin update, it was a big X11 update and the growing
pains are/were much larger than Cygwin. 

So I want to add my kudos to Yaakov, who basically volunteered to take one
for the team. 

I wish I was more competent with X11. I fixed my own stuff after the upgrade
by reading, persistence, and attitude. I choose to buckle down and do the
work rather than complain and I finally got round to several little todo's
that have been in my queue for a long time and I learned something along the
way.

For those still struggling and seeking specific options. I'd say start with
running the startxwin.bat provided with the upgrade rather than a pre
upgrade startxwin.bat. If that works to get a terminal running you are
probably half way there because you then know to start going through the
differences between the two start batches. If you normally start x some
other way then try the provided startxwin to see what happens; information
is a good thing.

If the new startxwin.bat doesn't work then your installation is probably
invalid and you can start asking specific questions about verifying
installation.



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