installer improvements

Jeremy Bopp jeremy@bopp.net
Wed Apr 7 14:02:00 GMT 2010


On 4/7/2010 8:32 AM, Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) [E] wrote:
> wefwef wefwef sent the following at Wednesday, April 07, 2010 8:18 AM
>> There are 94 servers on the list many of which don't have any obvious
>> geographic location (e.g. mirrors.dotsrc.org). There are 195 countries
>> in the world. That means an awful lot of people have to be an expert
>> on the geography of a foreign country in order to choose the correct
>> server. Well, I'm sure they can work it out - but wouldn't it be nice to
>> give them the choice to get the computer to work it out for them?
> 
> http://cygwin.com/mirrors.html gives locations.

As tiresome as this conversation is becoming, there is just no way a
simple user is going to first of all know to look at that location and
secondly spend the time to read it all while comparing with the mirror
list provided by setup.exe.  *Maybe* if the mirror panel in setup
mentioned that URL some users might look; otherwise, the mirrors.html
page may as well not exist for them.

What's being requested here is simply a button on the mirror selection
page which, when pressed, runs some sort of a ping test for each mirror
and reports the results.  Maybe the mirror list could be sorted from
fastest to slowest after the test completes, or a ping time column could
be added to the display.  It doesn't have to be perfect.  It just needs
to provide a clue and a starting point for new users to select their
first mirror.

All that said, the tone of the requester is not helping the setup
maintainer or the rest of the list really sympathize with his position.
 His points wouldn't be so bad if he merely asked for features and
improvements rather than demand them and belittle the maintainers when
they disagree.  Of course, his ideas might be accepted even quicker if
they were presented as patches.  Cygwin is a volunteer effort after all.

-Jeremy

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