setup.exe support for obsolete packages

[Harold L Hunt II <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

Let me preface this by saying that I am not going to make a crass 
decision that creates a mess in the package list.

Due to the reality of what Cygwin/X is as well as to recent events in 
the X community, I wish to rename the packages for Cygwin/X upon the 
next major release.  Here is a brief summary of the reasons:

1) Cygwin/X has never been a distribution of "XFree86" per se.  We 
distribute libraries and clients that have patches applied by them, but 
we have never distributed the real fruit of their project, which is the 
XFree86 X Server (which is basically for *nix-like OSes with direct 
access to the graphics hardware).  Our server is distinct from the 
XFree86 server.

2) Since we are not really distributing XFree86, it is misleading to 
call our packages XFree86-*.

3) Due to lack of cooperation, personality conflicts, and license 
issues, future Cygwin/X distributions will come from the X.Org 
Foundation project.  The source code tree is hosted at freedesktop.org. 
 Thus, having the XFree86 name in our packages becomes even more 
misleading.

4) We aim to slowly replace the X.Org Monolithic build with the X.Org 
Modular build (xserver, xlibs, and xapps projects at freedesktop.org). 
Thus, our xserver package may one day come from X.Org Monolithic and the 
next day (and from then on) it will come from the X.Org Modular tree. 
Eventually all of our libraries and clients will be in individual 
packages; it will be confusing to users if there is a compatibility 
package called xapps or xbin lying around that contains nothing.


Dealing with such a rename with the current version of setup.exe would 
cause a real mess.  If I rename the packages, then I have to leave about 
12 XFree86-* packages out there that are empty.  I would really like a 
way to suppress those packages from showing up as being newly 
installable, yet still getting the functionality of forcing them to be 
essentially uninstalled on the next upgrade that a user performs.

I would also like the XFree86 category to be renamed to X11, though I 
believe this can be accomplished by just changing any setup.hints that 
refer to the XFree86 category to instead refer to the X11 category.

As I said above, I'm not going to rename the packages en mass if I don't 
have a way to suppress the obsolete packages from being shown in 
setup.exe's list of installable packages.  I'll just have to leave the 
package names mostly as is in that case.

Is anyone interested in helping the Cygwin/X project by adding this 
functionality to Cygwin's setup.exe?  I would really appreciate the help 
since I will be busy trying to get this X.Org release ready.

On a side note, I can think of at least two ways to add this functionality:

1) Add a tag to setup.hint (which as to be processed by both setup.exe 
and the upset script) that indicates that a package should not be 
selectable for installation since it is obsolete.

2) Add a magic category call Obsolete.  Just adapt setup.exe to not show 
this category, yet allow it to process all packages in this category as 
normal (e.g. replacing the real package prefix-foo-1.0-1 with the empty 
prefix-foo-1.0-2 compatibility package when prefix-foo is renamed to 
just foo).

Thanks in advance,

Harold