Re: setup.exe: feature request with patch

[rl201 <rl201 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

Hi All,

This is a reposting of a mail I sent to cygwin@cygwin.com - more 
appropriate to cygwin-apps.

> On Mon, 6 Mar 2006, Dr. F. Lee wrote:
>
> > I deploy cygwin using unattended (http://unattended.sf.net/) and wpkg
> > (http://www.wpkg.org/). It's useful for me to be able to specify additional
> > packages to be installed on the command line. The attached file is a patch 
> > to
> > provide this: call "setup -p package1,package2,package3,...,packageN" to 
> > have
> > packages1-N artificially included in the 'Base' part of the distribution 
> > and
> > hence automatically included.
> >
> > No doubt there are many better ways of doing this (I'm not a C++ programmer
> > and had to go with 'what I could do' rather than 'the best way') but 
> > perhaps
> > this will be useful.

> First off, thanks for the patch -- it's always nice seeing someone
> actually try to solve the problem himself, whatever the eventual outcome.
> However, patches to setup should generally be sent to cygwin-apps (you'd
> have to subscribe).  FWIW, I've looked at the patch, and it seems to be
> doing what it promises to do (with two minor nits: the global
> packages_option seems superfluous, since you don't need to use it outside
> of package_meta.cc, and there is probably no reason to make a distinction
> on whether something was added via the command line or the user's
> selection)...  Further discussion of this should happen on cygwin-apps.

I'm a novice at C++, so I'm quite likely to have declared something 
incorrectly. I also couldn't see how to make the command line option set 
the default selection - which would be a more elegant method.

> But, more importantly, you don't have to do *any* C++ programming at all
> to achieve what you want.  Simply set up a local package server with one
> empty package, which is in Base and "requires:" all the packages you need
> installed.  But I agree that a command-line approach might be more
> comfortable in some cases.

Had thought about that, but I didn't see how to specify two repositories 
on the command line - and I didn't fancy having to run an httpd to serve 
a few files when it seemed like a useful thing for setup to do from the 
command line.

(As an aside, I've installed a dozen or so machines with this setup now, 
silently and with all the packages I need - I find the patch useful so I 
hope someone would be willing to polish / advise me how to polish it so it 
could be included in the 'official' version).

Yours,

Frank

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