Avoid collisions between parallel installations of Cygwin

Charles Wilson cygwin@cwilson.fastmail.fm
Mon Oct 12 21:18:00 GMT 2009


cgf wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 02:53:36PM -0400, Charles Wilson wrote:
>>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.

Sure. Once 1.5 goes poof, I was thinking of setting up on my machine a
bare-bones C:\cygwin-1.7-fallback installation for this sort of
thing...I had planned to use a debug-built cygwin DLL for this, so that
the shared data items would be isolated.  But exploiting this new
behavior Corinna is talking about will be better.

> Corinna is talking about allowing any 3PP-cygwin-containing package to
> calmly coexist with with an official cygwin release.

Right -- that's different than what I intend to use it for. But the
behavior will be there, and it'll work for me, for this purpose. So that
makes me happy -- and I was going to be sad when 1.5 went poof.  And
allowing 3PP to do whatever they want without affecting us is GREAT.
'Cause as much as we would like, they ain't goin' away, and they're
gonna keep doing.../that/.

> That means that it
> is possible for a naive user to be very confused about which version of
> cygwin they're running.

Ack.

> I have more to say about the subject but I don't have the time to say it
> right now.

NP.

--
Chuck




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