Re: No huge packets, please!

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

Rodrigo,

On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, Rodrigo Medina wrote:

> Hello!
>
>   First of all I want to congratulate all you people that have made
> possible CYGWIN+XFREE. I think that the whole is already a mature,
> wonderful product. In particular the new multiwindow feature of XWin
> is really cool.

FYI, most of this message (except, possibly, the above) should have been
sent only to the main cygwin list.  Please remove cygwin-xfree from
further discussion (that list munges the Reply-To: header, so you'll have
to do this manually).

>   I have a petition to make: Have a little bit of mercy with us poor
> guys that have slow internet connections! For example at home I have
> a connection that most of the time is below 1kb/s, with such a speed
> to download XFree86-fnts (16.3Mb) takes at least 5 hours (but it can
> take much more). During such a long time the chances of losing a dialup
> connection are very high. What can you do?
> a) avoid making huge packets (say more than 8-10 Mb). I am sure that
> most huge packets, that are composed of many directories, can be
> splitted in some sensible way; or
> b) implement some way of downloading the packets with ftp, so one can
> use wget or similar programs capable of partial downloading; or
> c) make the cygwin setup program capable of partial downloading.
>
> Thanks in advance
> Rodrigo Medina

Well, c) is on the setup TODO list (PTC[*] and, for the most part,
PGA[*]).  b) is already there -- all of the packages are available through
ftp mirrors (see <http://cygwin.com/mirrors.html>).  You should be able to
use wget to download the packages directly into the setup cache directory,
and then install from there.  You might also find Michael Chase's
clean_setup script useful (it's in the archives).  a) is unlikely -- the
packages are maintained on a volunteer basis, so it's up to individual
maintainers, but I know that splitting packages happens very rarely and
mostly due the interface changes, rather than size considerations.
	Igor
[*] <http://cygwin.com/acronyms/>
-- 
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