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Re: setup.exe sucks


Charles Wilson wrote:

Oh, well in that case, maybe a closer look at Dario's unfinished RPM-based "distribution". IIRC, it installed a bootstrap "cygwin" (compiled with a different shared mem keyword or something) and an rpm linked against that...

RPM installer (was Re: SETUP WIZARD FOR CYGWIN?XFREE86)
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2001-07/msg01429.html

"Guess who's back..." ;-)


Proposed RPM Installer Design
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2001-07/msg00074.html

Unfortunately, it seems that the design documenst (and the actual dist ISO) is no longer available:
http://www.helixdigital.com/~alcocer/rpm-installer/
gets a 404.

I still have the original texinfo documentation; I'd like to offer it as a starting point, in case anyone is still interested.

Dario's last message on this subject (24 Jul 2001) includes the following paragraph:
"Anyway, at some point I'd like to be able to offer it to the Cygwin
project. Unfortunately, it's still very immature to be widely
released, which is why I had not suggested or mentioned it before.
Nevertheless, if any of you are interested in playing around with the
installer, I could put a CD-ROM .iso image (~13MB) up on my web site
eventually when the work is done (I hope to have a very rough first
release by the middle of August."
But AFAICT, he never actually put it on the helixdigital site. Dario....Oh, Dario....

Believe it or not, I was pretty close to getting it ready for release in
August 2001. However, the consulting work that I'd been doing up to that point to help fund the project had dried up, and everyone remembers what happened the following month... I ended up shelving the project so that I could scrounge around for more work after 9/11 and the bursting of the "dot.com" bubble.


Anyway, I *still* have the pre-release ISOs that I had been testing
(complete with users guide in PDF, an installer written in Tcl/Tk, and
more.)  Although the actuall cygwin1.dll is very out-of-date, the offer
still stands: if anyone is interested in taking a look at it, let me
know and I can put it on the server.

I had tried picking this up where I left off about a year ago, but ran
into some prickly problems with the required libraries (Berkeley DB and
zlib, IIRC) which I was trying to work through with Nick and Chuck, but
I never did get feedback from Nick, so I gave up discouraged.

Now that Chris says he's willing to consider RPM again, I've suddenly
regained my enthusiasm for the "new setup" project. ;-)

FWIW, this was interesting (and funny, given the context of the current thread):

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2001-11/msg00612.html
"If we're going to go with a two phase setup, then [Dario's] idea makes more sense than continuing to roll our own. The big argument against his plan was (a) two phase is bad (b) why throw away our perfectly good setup tool. Okay, that's two arguments. ;-)"

Gosh, it's really interesting (to me, at least) that we've seem to come full-circle on this.

-- D.


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