Hi All, Christopher and I had a little conversation at the beginning of December. It occured to me/us that a lot of cygwin packages have postinstall scripts which just copy default versions of configuration files into the correct location if they don't already exist.
It was thought that this could be simplified into just one postinstallation script. Basically, the script would, when a new file has been placed under a particular directory (/etc/defaults/) it would be copied (/etc/defaults/ becomming the equivalent of /) if a file of the same name didn't already exist. This has (I think) two advantages 1) not everyone has to maintain such a post installation script and 2) there's no excuse not to make use of it and config files wouldn't be deleted upon uninstall. Anyway, the script... #!/bin/sh cd /etc/defaults for f in `find . -type f`; do fDest=`echo $f | sed 's/^\.//g'` if [ ! -f $fDest ]; then echo Using the default version of $fDest cp $f $fDest else echo $fDest is already in existance, not overwriting. fi done Packages can be found... (note that it needs renumbering, but should give you some idea of the functionality) <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j-n-s.morrison/john/cygwin/update-defaults/upd ate-defaults-1.0-1.tar.bz2> <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j-n-s.morrison/john/cygwin/update-defaults/def aults.html> (this should be added to the 'how to create a package' instructions, or something like?) <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j-n-s.morrison/john/cygwin/update-defaults/set up.hint> sdesc: "Conditionally move default files to proper location" category: _PostInstallLast requires: ash findutils fileutils sed sh-utils autodep: etc/defaults/.* incver_ifdep: yes <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j-n-s.morrison/john/cygwin/update-defaults/md5 sum> Also, I've re-done base-files using this mechanism as a demonstration... <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j-n-s.morrison/john/cygwin/base-files/base-fil es-1.2-1.tar.bz2> <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j-n-s.morrison/john/cygwin/base-files/setup.hi nt> <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j-n-s.morrison/john/cygwin/base-files/md5sum> Thanks for reading so much, hope to hear some feedback :) J.