Re: Attn: Yaakov [Was: Re: cygutils Postinstall Script Errors With Exit Code 128]

["Yaakov (Cygwin/X)" <yselkowitz at users dot sourceforge dot net>]

Sorry for missing this before.

On 2013-05-29 17:43, Charles Wilson wrote:
> Known issue, waiting for cygport fix.  cygutils relies on cygport
> auto-generating the postinstall scripts which invoke those tools.
> Cygport does this because the install package contains the following two
> files:
>
> /usr/share/applications/cygstart.desktop
> /usr/share/mime/packages/cygutils.xml
>
> ...and it generates the postinstall script unconditionally (e.g. I can't
> turn it off) and the generated postinstall scripts themselves call the
> tools unconditionally.  Cygport also automatically adds the packages
> which contain those tools to the requires: field of the setup.hint,
> so...under normal circumstances, everything should be fine.

Right, because packages providing those kind of files usually need those 
commands to be run in order for them to take effect; see below.

> However, at user request I've manually removed the requires: line,
> because the addition of these two files to the cygutils package
> shouldn't have the effect of pulling *PERL* into the Base category. I
> assumed we'd live with the semi-brokenness for a few days, until...

Perl?  I thought it was Python, due to a false positive in the 
dependency detection with glib2.0, which I fixed on sourceware.

But now that you mention it, is cygutils *supposed* to be in Base?  It 
is marked category: Utils, but seems to be pulled into Base only because 
of cygwin-doc (which *is* in Base, oddly enough; shouldn't it just be 
Doc?) listing it as a dependency.

> ...I'm waiting for Yaakov to say whether this should be "fixed" in
> cygport [1], or if I should override all the auto-generation stuff by
> manually creating an explicit postinstall script (with suitable tool
> existence checks) and setup.hint.

The "problem" here is that cygutils is not primarily a desktop-oriented 
package.  Most packages providing XDG menu and mime entries *are*, so 
these dependencies not only mandatory, but quite modest by those 
standards.  I added these files because it allows better integration 
between desktop file managers 
(Nautilus/Caja/Thunar/PCManFM/Dolphin/etc.) and Windows, e.g. making it 
easy to launch an EXE/MSI installer from one's Downloads folder. 
However, most people use cygutils outside of the desktop, so 
particularly if its pulled into Base, these deps would be more than the 
bare-minimal system.

If cygutils should be in Base, the "solution" is probably one of the 
following:

* provide these files (and postinstall scripts) in a 'cygutils-x11' 
subpackage;

* OR move them to another package (not sure which yet) which will 
already be installed in desktop scenarios, and adding cygutils as a 
dependency thereto.

For now, should we go with the first option?


Yaakov


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