Making a tailored Cygwin, something between Base and Full

Fergus fergus@bonhard.uklinux.net
Thu Sep 16 17:13:00 GMT 2010


The best solution to the problem of making a tailored Cygwin installation

Base + select handful of packages

but stopping short of Full (typically, well short of Full) seems to be 
Igor Pechtchanski's offered at

http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2005-01/msg00528.html

but probably with other references too. I have been able to achieve this 
many times in the past by incorporating a single additional paragraph 
into setup.ini, located near the top immediately between the lines

setup-timestamp: xxxxxxxxxx
and
@ ELFIO

and typically looking something like

@ anynameilike
category: Base
requires: bc bison expect flex gcc make ncurses readline util-linux
version: 8

where the required list comes after requires: (and some version number 
or other is necessary too).

Choose Default in setup.exe and away you go. You get Base + all your 
requirements AND with all dependencies attended to.

This has worked many times in the past but today I have tried it for the 
first time with the current version of setup.exe (and not for several 
predecessors) and for no reason that I can discern the @ anynameilike 
package is not being picked up. All that happens after choosing Default 
is that Base is installed, with none of the bespoke extras and 
dependencies that this algorithm is intended to achieve.

The only thing I can think of that might explain this is that maybe the 
  contrived package @ anynameilike needs to be located differently: 
maybe alphabetically (ie between @ antiword and @ apache ??) whereas 
previous versions of setup.exe have been more forgiving.

Dunno: but for the moment I seem to have lost this very useful 
capability simply and efficiently to make a tailored installation, and I 
wondered whether anybody else has tried this successfully in the past, 
but unsuccessfully now?

Thank you.

Fergus


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