setup.exe: "Can't open (null) for reading: No such file"

[Brendon Costa <bcosta at avdat dot com dot au>]

Hi all,

I have encountered a problem installing Cygwin using a recent setup.exe. 
I looked for previous posts about this subject and found a few. However 
they did not answer my questions. Following are references to similar posts:

http://www.mail-archive.com/cygwin@cygwin.com/msg08227.html
http://www.sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2002-12/msg00303.html
http://www.progressive-comp.com/?l=kde-cygwin&m=109146131922683&q=raw


I am attempting to download all cygwin packages locally, but only 
install a minimal selection of those packages for the moment. Basically 
i want to create a CD with a snapshot of all Cygwin packages from a 
point in time.

I previously had a bare bones cygwin install. I re-downloaded setup.exe 
from the website (using a recent setup.exe as of early May 2008) as i 
couldn't find the old setup.exe i used to perform the previous install.

I then removed any old cache files but not the old C:\cygwin install. I 
then executed setup.exe and selected Download but not install, and asked 
it to download everything. I came back after work and the download was 
apparently successful.

Then i re-ran the setup.exe this time I selected install from local 
directory and chose a number of packages to install. At various points 
during the install i had a message box pop up:

"Can't open (null) for reading: No such file"

After displaying this the install then moves onto the next package. Some 
of them seem to install successfully others do not.

I eventually got sick of the message box and aborted the installation 
mid way.


The questions i have are:

1) What is the cause of this "Can't open (null)" message box?

2) Is there any way of salvaging my current package download cache?

I would rather not re-download everything again (though would preferr 
this to a labour intensive task) and also would not like to go through 
and for each package that fails to install do some manual task to clean up.

3) Is it best that i wipe the existing (now partial) install of cygwin 
from my system and try to start from a clean slate?

4) If i have to re-download everything or do this again in the future, 
what is the best way to avoid this problem?


Just a side question, Does anyone know how much disk space it takes to 
locally cache:
* All binaries
* All sources

Thanks,
Brendon.


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