Local Package Installation Difficulties

[Larry Hall (Cygwin)]

Bueno, Denis wrote:
> Hi Cygwin-ers,
> 
> First let me say Cygwin is great.  ("Oh no," you think.  "Another rant crudely
> self-justified by a thin, introductory compliment.")  I promise, I've tried to
> make this email rant-less and useful to the cygwin community.  Cygwin makes my
> Windows life bearable, even enjoyable.  It is an excellent compatibility layer.
> And I've never had the least problem with Cygwin, until now.
> 
> I just had a difficult time installing Cygwin on a machine without external
> network access---so I was installing Cygwin from a local package list.  I don't
> have any more cygwin problems now, but I hope that by describing the problems I
> ran into and what I think _should have happened_, I can help all future users of
> cygwin.
> 
> At first I just copied the "packages" dir from an existing Cygwin installation
> onto the computer, and installed some things.  Immediately certain programs,
> notably bash, started failing during installation, saying that certain dlls were
> not installed.  Fortunately, this problem was easy to solve, as I found numerous
> such references on the mailing list.  All I had to do was install a few
> libraries (libintl, libiconv, etc.), which involved downloading them from a
> mirror, and re-copying the "packages" dir.  I was puzzled, though, since those
> packages were installed on the machine from which I had copied the "packages"
> directory.  Why hadn't they been copied over?
> 
> Well, they _had_ been copied over---the problem was that I had several mirrors
> in my "packages" directory, and Cygwin apparently chose the wrong one, as the
> missing packages were available from a different mirror.  I eventually deleted
> all the mirrors except the one I wanted, to make sure setup.exe chose that one.
> What should have happened is what already happens when you choose to install
> from the internet: the packages mirror you choose for a local install _ought to
> be explicit_.  You should have to choose it, like you choose a remote mirror.
> 
> After I fixed this problem (there were no other errors reported by setup.exe) I
> ran into weird behavior with certain commands: they just wouldn't do
> ... anything.  For example,
> 
>    $ ssh <host>
>    $
>    $ git-init
>    $
>    $ scp
>    [normal scp message]
> 
> So certain problems worked (scp) but others did (apparently) nothing.  After
> taking a look at setup.log.full, I figured out that post-install scripts for the
> offending programs were hard-failing.  In git's case, for example, the command
> 'cmp' couldn't be found (it is provided by diffutils).  This leads me to my
> second problem.
> 
> Why doesn't Cygwin _yell loudly_ at me about missing dependencies?  Before
> everything was working, I had to run setup.exe a bunch of times to install
> missing dependencies and then reinstall all packages (to make sure dependents
> were reinstalled and postinstall scripts re-run).  I had to manually figure out
> from setup.log.full that I needed texinfo, sed, binutils, and several other
> packages.
> 
> I assume that for each package knows nominally which other packages it
> depends on---as soon as I chose to install git and diffutils wasn't
> available, cygwin should have said:
> 
>    You chose to install git but one of its dependencies, diffutils (any
>    version), has not been found!  git probably won't work!  (To continue
>    anyway, click "Continue Anyway").
> 
> Or something.  Is this not possible or inadvisable for some technical reason,
> or has it simply not been done?
> 
> Anyway, I really do appreciate cygwin, despite this experience.  Everything
> seems to be working famously now.  Thanks again for cygwin.

Everything you point out is handled by 'setup.exe' in some way in the
situation where you install from the Internet.  Installing from a
local directory, while supported, is the road less traveled and has
some (additional) usability issues over installing from the Internet.
I would go so far as to say that these are known issues but I would
also say that you've done a nice job of outlining the issues you saw.

Now no reply to a report of bugs in 'setup.exe' would be complete
without pointing out the problem of development resources.  While
Corinna, Dave Korn, and others have contributed a number of recent
changes to support 1.7 and command-line installs, there's plenty to
do and more than our trusty setup maintainer Brian can handle in
short order.  So if anyone is interested in looking at any setup bug,
please feel free to jump in and generate a patch.  Additional information
can be found at <http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin-apps/setup.html>

-- 
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
216 Dalton Rd.                          (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746

_____________________________________________________________________

A: Yes.
 > Q: Are you sure?
 >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
 >>> Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?

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