Re: FW: Why the rash of people bypassing setup.exe to install?

["Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc.)" <lhall at rfk dot com>]

Dieter Meinert wrote:
> |=> -----Original Message-----
> |=> From: Max Bowsher [mailto:maxb@ukf.net]
> |=> Sent: Monday, February 17, 2003 7:01 PM
> |=> To: Dieter Meinert; cygwin@cygwin.com
> |=> Subject: Re: Why the rash of people bypassing setup.exe to install?
> |=> 
> |=> 
> |=> Dieter Meinert wrote:
> |=> > I was going through all this thread wondering if noone
> |=> > would see the (to me as a late Un*x guy) obvious:
> |=> >
> |=> > Consider a slooooooooooooooooooooow net connection, e.g by
> |=> > 14.4 K Modem, or as Hannu does,
> |=> > several hosts to be updated. The natural thing to me
> |=> > appears to download the tar file, unpack
> |=> > it somewhere, probably on a CD, and then run setup on your
> |=> > target machine.
> |=> 
> |=> What are you talking about? You do *not* unpack the 
> |=> downloaded tar files
> I did, well, almost.
> |=> manually. EVER. You use setup.exe. Why do you think that is 
> |=> a good idea?
>
> Because I installed cygwin just that way:
> I have no internet connection on my PC, so I borrowed a CD someone burned from the tarball.
> I put it into my CD drive, and copied setup.exe from CD to hard disk. 
> Then I ran setup.exe and gave it the path of my CDrom as source path.
> Since then cygwin (1.3.10) runs well on my PC. Well, maybe something changed in setup since 
> that version, I don't mind as long as this works for me. 

Ugh!  You are confused!  You admit to using setup to install.  This is
the recommended approach so I don't see how what you're suggesting is
any different than using one of the supported ways of installing with
setup.  It is not, nor has it ever been, a requirement that you be
connected to the internet to install via setup.  If you have already
downloaded the packages locally, you can install any of those packages
via setup without any internet connection.  This is apparently what you
did.  Your comment about "download a tar file, unpack it somewhere"
implies something else though and can't be reconciled with Cygwin
packages, their format, and how they are installed via setup.

For the record, it is *possible* to install a Cygwin package without
setup.  There's no magic here.  However, it is *not* recommended for
anyone that doesn't know about Cygwin packages and how they are made.
They are *not* just tar files.  They are bzipped tar files.  Not just
any tool that might know how to process bzipped tar files will understand
the Cygwin mount table or be able to create symbolic links.  No tool that
understands the file format will run the post installation scripts for
a package.  Setup does all this.  This is why we recommend using it.
Clearly you did so it appears you are confused about the topic of
this discussion, which is no crime.  But let's end this line of
discussion here since it really doesn't contribute anything to the
topic at hand.

TIA,


--
Larry Hall                              lhall@rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      http://www.rfk.com
838 Washington Street                   (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
Holliston, MA 01746                     (508) 893-9889 - FAX


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting:         http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/