Re: automated cygwin install

[Rolf Campbell <rcampbell-cygwin at dragonwaveinc dot com>]

On 2011-09-09 09:52, Andrew Schulman wrote:
> In a new installation, we have to write an (ugh) MSDOS CMD script, since bash isn't available.  One
> way around that would be to install just the base, then run a bash script, but I decided to bite the
> bullet and write a CMD script that would do it all in one go.
>
> Here's what mine looks like:
>
> setup.exe ^
> --no-shortcuts ^
> --quiet-mode ^
> --disable-buggy-antivirus ^
> --packages ^
> aria2,^
> atool,^
> autoconf,^
> automake,^
> autossh,^
>
> and so on.  Two things to notice:
>
> * The caret (^) character at the end of every line is CMD's line continuation character.  (Maybe you
> already knew that, but not being very experienced with CMD, I had to look around to find it out.)
>
> * The list of package names is comma-delimited.  This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere in the
> setup help, but the --packages option expects a comma-delimited list of package names.  If you
> space-delimit them, only the first one will be installed and the rest will be ignored.
>
> Nirvana.  A one-click new Cygwin installation, with all of my favorite packages.  I hope it's useful
> to others.

I did something similar a few weeks ago but the trouble I had with 
running in either semi-unattended or fully unattended mode; there is no 
initial progress display before it starts to parse the .ini file(s). 
Since I'm running this from a shortcut, on a network drive, it sits with 
no indication (at all) that you even correctly double-clicked for 
between 5 and 10 seconds.  People get frustrated and think they didn't 
properly launch it and try it again, and again, and again only to have 4 
or 5 windows eventually pop up.

I wish there was a way to get setup to show *something*, anything (even 
just a splash screen) during a semi-unattended mode before it shows the 
.ini parsing progress -- to reassure the user that something is happening.


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