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Request for feature: more flexible setup routine


I *love* Cygwin. I use it to get my work done every day. I am grateful to everyone who has contributed to it over the years and continues to do so. Thank you. That bears repeating: Thank you!

I have one suggestion: I wish that the setup routine was better for... users like me who mainly want to get work done, don't care necessarily care whether we have the latest versions of every package (honestly, most of package changes are irrelevant to most people most of the time (OK, until you need it...)), and more than anything else, don't want to break anything that works.

One of the beautiful things about Cygwin's setup.exe is that when--perhaps in the middle of trying to get something done before a deadline--I realize that a Cygwin package I didn't think I'd need would help. If it hasn't been *too* long since I last installed, I go and mark the package to install, carefully make sure that I mark all other new packages as "keep", and hit next. Great. The 1.7 upgrade has made that a pita. I am *not* going to install 1.7. Not now. I'm in the middle of a project. I just wanted one little tool.

What I hope will be added is some way to allow setup.exe to look farther back in the past, or automatically ignore most package releases. Something--something so that I can get the functionality of setup.exe for one or two packages when I haven't updated anything for while--because it was working fine! And I don't fix what's not broken.

(I never install everything--I'd be willing to waste the disk space, but too often incompatibilities break things. That's also why I don't upgrade what doesn't need upgrading. One time in five something is installed that screws up something I had working. That's not a complaint; it's inevitable with a complex system. I also don't regularly upgrade everything, because when I do I sometimes have to fix something major, or just fix some packages that has been "improved" in such a way that I can no longer work the way I want without undoing something and recustomizing it. Again: Inevitable with a complex system.)

Last but not least--I can't say it enough:
Thank you!


Marshall Abrams
marshall@logical.net



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