Is 1.7 ready?/Installation Issues

[Dave & Diane]

Hi!

I've been a loyal fan of cygwin for a number years, and I have the 
utmost respect for the effort it takes you all to continue to develop it 
- its a great platform. So first a big big thank you.  I don't know 
where I'd be on my PC without cygwin.

I've been running 1.7 since fairly early on in its life and for a long 
time now I've been using 1.7 as my base environment at home. However 
I've never migrated my office system from 1.5. What follows is a few 
observations which lead me to ask if 1.7 is really ready for release 
next week.

For many months I've had a stable 1.7 system at home. A couple of times 
the X server stopped working and then started working again with a 
subsequent update. Right now its again not working. I'm not going to try 
and debug that here. On my work system, I've been trying to get 1.7 to 
work for a few months, numerous attempts without clear success, and 
recently the updates appear to be worse.

The first problem I have on my work system is that somehow, the base 
bash files (bashrc etc) don't appear in /etc. Now I could manually 
install files and probably hack it together, but I've deliberately been 
careful not to do anything manually like that to determine why or how it 
got to that state but I've been unsuccessful. I've even completely wiped 
out the 1.7 dir tree and installed fresh using the latest setup-1.7, and 
yet the problem continues. I think there is a problem with bash 
installation.

Secondly, while updating the said "bad" installation, I've noticed 1.7 
take absolutely forever to install things in setup and it seems worse 
this past month. Setup downloads packages cleanly and then begins the 
installs. This week I updated and it took 4 hours to complete the 
postinstall process for at most a dozen packages.. CPU was practically 
idle but it crawled along and eventually completed. Even on Tuesday (I 
think) when there were only 2 packages to update, it took 2 hours to 
complete the post install process. It feels like there is a problem in 
the base locking algorithm that is causing extended delays.

Also, while doing an install, I get errors about files in use, and what 
I find is that setup (through installation) has spawned a number of bash 
shells which don't cleanly exit and subsequently block setup until I end 
them with task manager. Of course, I understand that perhaps that is 
ultimately degrading the system - but there seems to be a problem with 
bash shells not exiting and hanging.

Along similar lines I've seen fontconfig just take the CPU and run at 
100% for 10s of minutes during an install/update. This is quite a 
different behaviour and I don't know what its eating so much CPU for 
during installation.

My home system is an old desktop Pentium 4 hyperthreaded processor 
running Win XP Home SP3. My work system is a core 2 duo based system 
running XP Pro SP3

I appreciate that I'm not giving you a lot to go on here, but my gut 
tells me there are some serious gremlins in the guts and in the 
installation still, it certainly prevents me from moving my 1.5 system 
to 1.7 at work and I'm worried that if 1.7 is released you'll be 
overwhelmed with support requests that are eerily similar. This is why I 
ask if 1.7 is ready for prime time. Perhaps I'm just being unlucky, and 
thats ok.

Even during my fresh install (into new dirs) this evening, postinstall 
for base-cygwin took ages (over 15 mins) with setup sat at 
000-cygwin-post-install.sh

Once the install has completed, I'll send my cygcheck output (probably 
in the morning). I'd appreciate any input on the installation issues - 
I'll take my X issues to cygwin-xfree after this is fixed. My setup is 
version 2.661

Looking back through the mail list, I found Jeffrey Friedl report 
something that sounds very very similar to what I am seeing.

Cheers
Dave


-- 

Diane & Dave
http://www.velvetstarbears.com/  http://www.kringlecottage.com/
Fortune: The difference between America and England is that the
English think 100 miles is a long distance and the Americans
think 100 years is a long time.



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