Re: Install failing and leaving unusable system

[Igor Peshansky <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Sun, 29 Oct 2006, Julian Hall wrote:

> I know this has been discussed here before, but it seems that it's
> something that happens to a lot of people, so it should probably be
> fixed.  It seems as though a fairly simple update to the setup program
> might be helpful to people who have the problem.  In script.cc, there
> are currently lines that read:
>
>  if (retval)
>    log(LOG_PLAIN) << "abnormal exit: exit code=" << retval << endLog;;
>
>  /* if file exists then delete it otherwise just ignore no file error */
>  io_stream::remove ("cygfile://" + scriptName + ".done");
>
>  io_stream::move ("cygfile://" + scriptName,
>                   "cygfile://" + scriptName + ".done");
>
> I'd suggest changing them so that the destination filename in the case
> of an abnormal exit is different (e.g. scriptName + ".failed").  A flag
> could then be set so that a dialog box is shown at the end, stating that
> errors occurred running the postinstall scripts, and directing users to
> a simple shell script that can be run after rebooting, which will run
> all the /etc/postinstall/*.failed scripts and move them to appropraite
> ".done" names.
>
> Does that sound like a sensible idea?

It does sound reasonable, but here are a couple of observations:

1) This was proposed before (see the discussion thread starting at
<http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2006-03/msg00062.html>).  One
alternative is to avoid renaming the failed scripts altogether, so that
they get re-run on next setup.

2) Even if this change gets applied to CVS HEAD, we still need a new setup
release to make sure this gets used.
	Igor
-- 
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