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RE: startxwin/XWin won't start properly


cgf,

I'll start off by saying I sense an attitude of "only gurus need apply
and gurus don't need help" from you.  To me that's very OpenBSD, but not
very Cygwin.

If I sense incorrectly, I suggest what you are writing leads me to feel
that way.  If that's correct, I suggest we'll never come to an agreement
and we may as well drop the subject.

Christopher Faylor wrote:
>On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 09:02:34AM -0500, Timares, Brian (Harris)
wrote:
>>Larry Hall (Cygwin X) wrote:
>>>On 6/30/2010 1:07 AM, Bradley, Mike wrote:
>>>> OK, I removed my old cygwin installation (the directory which
contains/usr,
>>>> /bin/, etc.), and re-installed a new version.  I kept the
"cygwin_package"
>>>> directory, but setup.exe did not remember my previous installation.
In the
>>>> past I have had to install cygwin on multiple machines, and it
would be nice
>>>> to learn a way to have a file which describes the packages I want
to install,
>>>> rather than having to recall them all.
>>>
>>>'setup.exe' doesn't remember your previous installations - ones you
have
>>>removed.  There'd be little call for that kind of functionality.
'setup.exe'
>>
>>I disagree.  I've had to reinstall cygwin from scratch several times,
>>and also have different coworkers who can benefit from cygwin, but
>>saying "Go through the long list of groupings, including the even
>>longer sublist of packages, ignoring lib*" is not very helpful.  Most
>>of my coworkers are not sysadmins or Unix gurus so they look at a lot
>>of packages and say "I'll just use puTTY".  And it takes a lot of
time.
>>But no one wants EVERYTHING, a lot of it is not useful to us.
>
>You misunderstand what Larry is saying.

Actually no, I don't.  Although I will admit as I get older I do miss
more and more and it is frustrating!

>He is referring to wiping out your installation and then expecting
>Cygwin to magically remember what you used to have.

Hmm, I don't recall magic being mentioned.  I know I have had to wipe
out the installation (new laptop, troubles with PC, troubles with Cygwin
where one wants a clean install), or find that my chosen install site
has dropped off the list, or found that some other site has more
up-to-date updates [that matter to me].  And I've wished everytime, from
the first reinstallation to the most recent, that I didn't have to go
through the list, picking what I know is useful and leaving out what my
I don't want or my constraints don't allow.

>You are talking about having a fixed set of packages to install and
>apparently expect that you will be able to use software without
actually
>investigating how to use it.  If you read the documentation on
setup.exe

Yes, then no.  How long has it been since you've gone through the full
list of packages that Cygwin offers?  There are 29 catagories and I am
NOT counting what is underneath them.

Yes, I feel that my coworkers should be able to use, say, X Windows
programs, without understanding unix.  Or if they do know unix, they
should be able to expect that, say, bc is there w/o having to look for
it.

However this discussion more properly belongs on a more general Cygwin
list.  I'll see if it makes sense to post a suggestion there.

>you'll find how to specify the packages you want on the command line.
>If you make a .bat file available with the right packages then all of
>the poor non-UNIX-gurus who can't figure out how to pick "openssh" from
>a list will be able to just run "pleasedoitforme.bat" .

How many packages are we talking about here?  Wait, you don't know.  So
I'll just reject your suggestion as inappropriate for my situation,
although I think for some people it is a pretty good work-around.

What Mike and I want is actually pretty reasonable.  We want to be able
to preserve the work we do in picking the wheat from the chaff (from our
point of view) to avoid having our coworkers or ourselves duplicate that
work, whether they understand Unix or not (I'm sorry I brought it up!
It is largely irrelevant.).  It seems simple--at some point the Setup
program knows what was selected.  It just needs to save it out and be
able to read it back in.


Brian Timares

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