where is setup.exe source?

[Igor Pechtchanski]

On Sun, 6 Nov 2005, Brian Dessent wrote:

> Carl Karsten wrote:
>
> > What builds the setup.exe source?
>
> Anyone who wants to.  If you mean who compiles the setup.exe binaries
> that are on the mirrors, that would be the maintainers (currently Max
> Bowser and myself, although Igor helps so much he's a de facto
> maintainer.)

Thanks for that... :-)

> As to the location of the source, please read
> <http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2005-10/msg01019.html>.  Since you are the
> second person who has asked this in the last week I have to wonder if
> there is something about the website that's unclear.  Is there any
> wording that could be made more clear to answer what I would hope would
> be a simple question of "where is the source"?

Perhaps we need a couple of FAQ entries for setup.exe and its source?

> > I am interested in an option to prob all the servers and disable the
> > ones that are currently off line.  Maybe even do a traceroute and sort
> > by number of hops.
>
> This, however is going to be rather fruitless.

I disagree.  FWIW, keeping the local ping response time information for
mirrors and re-pinging on demand has been on my TODO list for a while.
The only thing I would strenuously object to is re-pinging the mirrors
automatically on every setup -- it's much better to let the user update
the mirror information (by adding a "Ping" button).  I don't recall if the
mirror list is sortable, actually -- if it isn't, it ought to be.  BTW,
now that setup is resizable, it would make sense to at least add the
location information from mirrors.lst to the mirror list dialog.

> The list of mirrors is already checked frequently (at least daily) by
> automatic infrastructure on the cygwin.com machine, and any mirror that
> is offline or is more than 24 hours out of sync is automatically removed
> from the mirrors.lst file.

This works for dead mirrors, but doesn't do anything for (a) mirrors
explicitly added in the past, though Buzz's patch tries to address this,
and (b) mirrors that are up-to-date but across an extremely slow link from
the local machine.  I think the OP is actually asking for the ping
information w.r.t. the local machine.

> So barring a local connectivity problem, if it's in the mirrors.lst file
> (which is the same data as presented <http://cygwin.com/mirrors.html>)
> then it's guaranteed to be fresh and online.

But that's the point.  Links differ.  I don't think the fact that some
mirror in the US is fast for me is going to mean that someone in, say, the
Philippines won't be better off with a local mirror.  Some countries also
have bandwidth restrictions for foreign connections, which could be termed
a "connectivity problem", but isn't something easy to work around.

Another problem is the sort order for the mirror list (the fact that
mirrors are sorted alphabetically has caused at least one good mirror --
archive.progeny.com -- to drop Cygwin, as people just picked the first
available one).  Sorting by ping time would be ideal.  Randomizing the
list (as apache does) is at least going to ensure a reasonable
distribution of hits on various mirrors.  As I said, I'm waiting for a
round tuit...

> > Or at least export the list so that a seperate utility could be used
> > to pick a server.
>
> <http://cygwin.com/mirrors.lst> should be trivial to process with
> sed/awk/perl/etc.

Yuk.  Then you'd need to pass this information to setup (not easy, as
setup actually grabs one from cygwin.com).  It's better to do this in
setup proper.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_		pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		igor@watson.ibm.com
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski, Ph.D.
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. /DA

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/