Mo Dejong's install problems

["Parker, Ron" <rdparker at butlermfg dot com>]

Mo DeJong wrote:

> Re: The installer posted by Ron Parker.

<snip>

Sorry for the slow response, I just explained to Chris in a private e-mail
that apparently one of the inbound mail servers was throwing away all e-mail
it received and reporting it as delivered. Chris mentioned you had problems
and I searched the archives for your original email.

> I first downloaded the cygwin installer and saved it in D:\Cygwin. I then
> extracted all the .tar.gz files from cygwin into D:\Cygwin.

For starters, there is no need to extract the tar.gz files yourself. The
setup program does this for you.

> The "cygwin setup" program was a dos based util that asked me where the
> root directory should be located. I chose the default of C:\.

Actually it is a 32-bit Windows console program.

I will check this, it should not have defaulted to C:\ unless you previously
mounted C:\ as root. It may be that the version on my website predates the
code that checks for a previous root mount.

> It then asked me if I wanted to download packages from the internet. I
> typed "no".

> At that point, it started installing every .tar.gz file it found
> (the ones located in subdirectories of D:\Cygwin).

This was the intended behavior. 

The setup program will install any packages that are in the same directory
as the setup.exe or in any of its subdirectories. The logic behind the
subdirectory checking is in case someone did a recursive get with ncftp or a
similar client.

> The installer seemed to create everything in the "C:\" directory.
> At the very least, the default should be something like "C:\Cygwin-1.1.1"
> or "C:\Program Files\Cygwin-1.1.1", not the "C:\" directory!

It creates it in whatever directory you specify as root at the first prompt
that it presents.

> The installer program seemed to "get stuck" after printing the
> following text to the screen. "Creating the uninstall file...".
> I was not sure if the program had crashed or if it was doing
> something. After about 10 minutes I had to kill the program
> to do anything on my system (a Win 95 box).

I doubt it was stuck, with at least one version of the setup program it was
a very slow process.  This may be the version you tried.

The setup program generates a log of files that are extracted from the
tar.gz files this is simply the piped output of the tar commands.  It then
reads this file and passes each one's name, which is in Unix format, to
cygpath for conversion to Windows format.  These DOS style file names are
used in the uninstall batch file.

I use cygpath because Chris did not want setup to depend on any internal
cygwin functionality and the setup.exe is a Windows program not a cygwin
program. Since it is a Windows program it was behaving like calling cygpath
repeatedly from the "MS-DOS Prompt" instead of being as fast as calling it
repeatedly in bash or a shell script. I have dramatically sped up this
process by preloading cygwin.dll so that each invocation of cygpath does not
have to load the DLL into memory.

> I had to reboot my box to get it working again after the installer
> crashed. I then tried to run what I thought would be the cygwin
> bash shell by choosing the following menu item
> Start->Programs->Cygnus Solutions->Cygwin-1.1.0.
> The old B.20 install I had on this box (I just uninstalled B.20)
> would launch bash when I clicked on that menu item, but this
> version just printed:

> Out of environment space
> Out of environment space
> Bad command or file name

> I am guessing a .bat file is being used and that the proper
> executable could not be found on the PATH.

A .bat file is being used. The "Out of environment space" message occurred
when it tried to add the cygwin directories to the path.  I am not sure if
there is a way I can programmatically specify a larger environment space
when I create the shortcut. I will look into this as well.

> I then decided I would uninstall cygwin and try again but use "C:\Cygwin"
> as the root directory. I looked in the "Add-Remove programs" list
> but there was no listing for cygwin. I am no windows expert, so I
> did not want to try to hack the registry to remove whatever settings
> the installer created. I was stuck at this point.

Had the installer finished the uninstall file creation process, there would
have been another item on the start menu for uninstalling the whole thing. 

I mentioned on the list that I did not add the program to the "Add-Remove
Programs" list, because the uninstall script is just a batch file and had no
way of removing the item from the list after uninstalling. DJ had
recommended that I look at regtool. I will look at it and see about adding
the information to the "Add-Remove Programs" list.

> I hope that helps.

It does.