how to automatically install all local packages

[Max Bowsher]

Tod Courtney wrote:
>> I appreciate both of your helpful replies.  I guessed there would be ways
>> to 'trick' the setup using configuration files and looked a little bit, 
>> but
>> hadn't figured out how to do it.  I understand both of your answers and
>> will consider them if my patch (see next) takes some time to be accepted.
>>
>> I did determine how to change the setup code in order to set the initial
>> installation mode to 'install' instead of 'default'.  Once I found the
>> place, it turned out to be a very small change.  Basically I added a new
>> command line option '-I, --install' that installs all available patches,
>> rather than only installing the 'default' patches.
>>
>> The patch is included below.  This patch is relative to the HEAD version,
>> but the same patch can be applied to the current release code without any
>> changes.  From what I could tell, posting the patch to this list is the
>> appropriate first step to its possible inclusion in the code.  I hope the
>> patch can be included, as it will be very helpful to me and my user base,
>> and seems to have a very small probability of introducing problems.
>>
>> If there is a better way to submit this patch, please let me know.

The patch submission is fine.

However, I disagree with the concept of the patch.

In the general case, an 'install all' feature will be almost never useful, 
since the Cygwin distribution contains so many packages that it is almost 
impossible to want to use every one.

Furthermore, although setup doesn't explicitly implement it (yet) it is 
possible for packages to conflict with others - we even have a pair of 
packages for which this is the case: only one of tetex-tiny and tetex-base 
should ever be installed at a time.

As I understand it, your use case is that you need a set of packages to 
default to "Install". Since you already need to produce a custom setup.ini, 
it should be very easy for you to ensure that each of your packages in in 
either the "Base" or "Misc" category, which will cause setup to behave as 
you want, right now, without a patch. Is there a reason why this technique 
is not more useful than a command line option?

>> On a related note, could someone explain the release schedule for 'setup'

Ad-hoc, as needed, no pre-arranged schedule.

Max.