Avoid collisions between parallel installations of Cygwin

[Earnie Boyd]

Quoting Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please@cygwin.com>:

> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 02:53:36PM -0400, Charles Wilson wrote:
>> Corinna wrote:
>>> Here are the questions.
>>> - Does anything speak against the idea of the patch?
>>> - Does anybody see a problem with the patch?
>>> - Anything else?
>>
>> I think it's great. I have found it SO useful to have both a cygwin-1.5
>> and a cygwin-1.7 tree installed (e.g. when I break my 1.7 tree I can fix
>> it using familiar cygwin tools from the 1.5 installation, rather than
>> cmd.exe or explorer) -- and I've been able to do that because the
>> 1.5/1.7 versions *mostly* don't interfere.
>
> But, two things to remember:  1) You're an experienced user and 2) We're
> talking about two different releases.
>
> Corinna is talking about allowing any 3PP-cygwin-containing package to
> calmly coexist with with an official cygwin release.  That means that it
> is possible for a naive user to be very confused about which version of
> cygwin they're running.
>
> I have more to say about the subject but I don't have the time to say it
> right now.

Chris, MSYS has been doing this since its first release.  There has  
been zero confusion with end user community and there are many  
packages that have released with their own distribution of MSYS.  If  
you really need to know which version of Cygwin you're running you can  
always include it in the header of the term window.  I use the  
following PS1 string in my .profile file.

#Determine windows path
W=`cygpath -w \`pwd\``

#Determine identifying version info
V=`echo -n \`uname -r | cut -d \( -f 1\`-\`uname -v | sed -e 's/ /@/'\``

#Reset bash prompt
export PS1='\[\033]0;CYGWIN-$V($W):\w\007
\033[47m\033[30m\]\u@\h \[\033[47m\033[35m\w\033[0m\]
$ '

--
Earnie