Capturing a Cygwin instance from another PC

[Jose Isaias Cabrera]

On Monday, November 27, 2023 12:43 PM, Brian Inglis expressed:
> Cc: Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@Shaw.ca>
>
> On 2023-11-27 01:24, ASSI via Cygwin wrote:
> > Chris Wagner via Cygwin writes:
> >> If you just want to duplicate the package selection this trick is all
> >> you need.
> >> 1. Get the current list: cygcheck -cd |perl -ane '$\=","; print $F[0]'
> >> 2. Ignore the "Cygwin,Package" at the front.
> >> 3. Copy all that and put it as the command line argument to setup.exe -P
>
[clip]

> so from 2-7 times as many packages as manually picked could be dependencies
> automatically installed.

Thank you for all the responses on this thread, but, I went with Backwoods BC's method who wrote:

>I'll also add my vote for "this should be easier." I've done it a half
>a dozen times over the years and I found that the fastest method was
>to take several screen shots of Cygwin setup showing what I have
>installed, take those to the new machine, and manually go down the
>list selecting the same things. It's stupidly low tech, but it's
>actually quite fast (~ 5 minutes) and I know that it will always work
>without annoying glitches.

Which worked by me. I ran setup and by choosing "Picked" in the "View" choice in the machine that I wanted to clone, which I only had one screen. I know this is not asked often, but I have done this multiple times through my many years of my cygwin life, and I am sure many others have done it. If it was available, it would be used much frequently. So, here is my input on this (Perhaps a 9 step process):
1. Run setup on the machine to be cloned (MachineA)
2. Click on the "Create File For Cloning" checkbox (NEW)
3. Click next (This will create a file that will be used for cloning) (NEW)
4. Place the file created on step 3 on the machine which will use the Cygwin close (MachineB)
5. Run setup on MachineB
6. Click on the "Use Clone File" (NEW)
7. Browse to choose the cloning file (NEW)
8. Read the cloning file (NEW)
9. Click Next and continue normal setup, but now, the packages will be chosen.

This will be a nice and easy way of cloning.