1.5 / 1.7 setup.exe entanglement?

[Warren Young]

I got a new machine at work a few weeks ago, and decided to install 
Cygwin 1.7 on it, and not even mess with 1.5.  Can't test what you don't 
use, right?

For reasons that aren't important here, today I decided I needed a copy 
of 1.5 as well.  This means I have the reverse of the recommended setup, 
which is having 1.5 installed in c:\cygwin, and 1.7 elsewhere.  1.7 on 
my machine is in c:\cygwin, and 1.5 is in c:\cygwin-1.5.

The installation of 1.5 failed in several ways.  The way it failed makes 
me wonder if some part of the setup process was erroneously referring to 
stuff in c:\cygwin instead of c:\cygwin-1.5.

The first weird thing is that the first time I ran 1.5's setup.exe on 
this machine, "Local Package Directory" on the fourth page of setup.exe 
defaulted to my Cygwin 1.7 download directory.  On a fresh machine, I 
thought this value defaulted to the location of setup.exe.  How did it 
find this other location if not by peeking into c:\cygwin or 1.7's 
registry keys?

On subsequent runs, 1.5's setup.exe did have the correct location for 
this value.  This makes me think it's storing the location separately 
for each version, but that doesn't explain everything.

More seriously, the resulting setup did not contain bash.exe, 
cygreadline6.dll, or cygncurses-8.dll.  On re-running setup.exe to 
install bash.exe -- the first thing I noticed missing -- the postinstall 
scripts all failed to run due to the DLLs missing.  Apparently setup.exe 
just quietly ate the errors to launch the postinstall scripts due to 
missing bash.  I had to go back through setup.exe a few times fighting 
past the postinstall errors to get the DLLs sorted out.  Once I did, all 
the postinstall scripts ran as expected.

Another thing that leads me to believe setup.exe for 1.5 is seeing 
things in my 1.7 install that it shouldn't is that a lot more things got 
installed than I thought was in Cygwin 1.5 base.  I didn't select any 
optional packages...I just wanted a basic 1.5 installation for testing. 
  I got things like Python and X, which I installed under 1.7 knowingly.

My theory is that all of these latter problems are due to 1.5's 
setup.exe looking at the package list in 1.7 erroneously.  This would 
explain why it thought it didn't need to install bash, libreadline, or 
libncurses -- it thought they were up to date.  It also explains why it 
pulled in all those other packages, because it thought I wanted them.

I'm not sure how much this matters right now.  I freely acknowledge I'm 
doing something a little weird here.  I just wonder, if I'm right about 
this and it isn't fixed, what will happen when more people start 
installing 1.7 by default, but install 1.5 beside it later for backwards 
compatibility testing.

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