Avoid collisions between parallel installations of Cygwin

Earnie Boyd earnie@users.sourceforge.net
Tue Oct 13 13:55:00 GMT 2009


Quoting Charles Wilson <cygwin@cwilson.fastmail.fm>:

> Earnie wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Errr...you're kinda stealing a base, here.
>
> (1) cygwin HASN'T done or allowed that, so most of OUR users are
> unfamiliar with the issues that may arise with multiple cygwin
> installations. In fact, most of the time if they report such problems we
> tell 'em "don't do that."  This is a big change for the cygwin
> community: less so technically than sociologically.  It doesn't matter
> that MSYS -- a completely different project with a mostly different user
> community -- has allowed this from the beginning.  That's them. This is us.
>

My point here is that MSYS is a derivative of Cygwin.  This is a prime  
consideration that tool users make when supplying a distribution of a  
product.

> (2) There are multiple MSYS derivatives out there, true. But I'd wager
> that most users of MSYS-git (or PhoenixMSYS, etc) use exclusively that
> version, and do not attempt to install both an MSYS-git tree AND and
> mingw.org MSYS tree.  Maybe there are five people in the world who have
> done so.  So this still doesn't (directly) support your argument about
> simultaneous parallel installs.
>

GIT started out with Cygwin and changed to MSYS.  I wonder why?   
Interoperability maybe?  Don't know.  I do know that a commercial  
product used by my employer uses Cygwin and has a Cygwin in its path.   
I also know that Cygwin is an employer approved FOSS product that many  
of our developers use along with this other product.  The issue  
becomes trying to use the commercial product from within the standard  
Cygwin product and it is this issue the paying client is trying to  
overcome.

I would wager that many people using these tools had MSYS installed  
already to being with.  MSYS-GIT is certainly bantered on the MinGW  
lists.

> But that's ok. We all know this can be made to work -- partly because of
> the current cygwin DEBUGGING support, partly by the example of MSYS, and
> partly because Corinna has already tested it.
>

Not to mention the basis of the change I made for MSYS and Corinna  
made for Cygwin.

--
Earnie




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