Having started setup.exe, after negotiating the chooser window (which took a while. BTW, to avoid confusion, I think it would be a good idea to replace the X-in-a-box, that signifies you want something, with a tick)
Feel free to submit some replacement graphics. If they look nicer than what we have currently, I'll be happy to commit them.
, when I tried to download, the program seemed to shoot quickly through (without actually downloading anything, although it did create the directory structure) before I got a dialog box like this:
Cygwin Setup ------------------------------- Download Incomplete. Try again?
Yes No
I chose Yes, and got this:
Cygwin Setup ------------------------------------------------- Unable to get setup.ini from <ftp://mirrors.rcn.net/pub/sourceware/cygwin>
OK
This problem actually occurred first with a different mirror - the one that appears on the top of the mirrors list. I had to log off after getting that far, and tried the mirror mentioned above (then got to this point) the following day, so it's not a mirror-specific problem.
Umm. Strange, and I'm not sure how we could go about debugging this.
I was now able to select a different mirror, so I chose the top one. Everything I'd picked in the chooser window was as far as I could tell still there. (although checking it all would not be practical, especially if I'd be able to get no further). I moved past it, and this time the downloading occurred.
Despite my connection speed, download (BTW, I'd chosen the default, Direct Connection) only seemed to occur at 59.5 kbps average and so took over two hours, so I'm reluctant to have to go through it again - leading to the question of will I be able to use a later, fixed version of setup.exe to install what I've already downloaded if the current one fails to install on my platform too?
A setup.exe package cache is literally just a setup.ini file and a hierarchy of tarballs.
Perhaps you should google for "clean_setup.pl", a Perl script by Michael A. Chase, which provides some useful features for managing and reporting on setup package caches.
I did have to leave the room quite a bit - well, I couldn't watch the screen for two hours - but at some point, PROBABLY after the download claimed to be 90% of the way through, I am pretty sure that either it sped up immensely or stopped early, and I'm not sure what to make of that - perhaps it didn't go all the way to 100% since I hadn't chosen to download every cygwin package, but as I didn't choose as high a proportion of the stuff as 90% I'm worried about this.
Try clean_setup.pl - it will find and warn about missing or truncated files.
Even so, everything I wanted seemed to have come through - except the source for crypt. It is possible I forgot to select that, but I don't think I did, and with all the problems I was facing it could certainly have been setup.exe's fault - more on this later.
If you are intending to maintain a local package mirror, I find it a great deal more comfortable to use wget to download a setup.ini file, clean_setup.pl to produce a list of URLs to feed to wget to download the packages, wget to download the list, and clean_setup.pl to sort the downloaded files away into the proper directory heirarchy, than to use setup's downloading feature.
However, it had come through into a directory with a name corresponding to the name of the first mirror I'd tried - the second, successful one had a directory with a corresponding name but that only had a setup.ini file in it. (Do I need to do anything about this?)
To make the files visible to setup.exe regardless of your future mirror choices, you can move the entire contents of the mirror-named directories up one directory level, and then rmdir the mirror dir.
Plus, although I'd put setup.exe into a folder entitled C:\cygcache and run it from there (and used it as the directory to download into), another folder, C:\cygwin, was created as well. It contains only 5 very small files in C:\cygwin\etc\setup.
Hmm, I guess that's a bug. Setup shouldn't be creating those in download-only mode if the folder does not already exist. Nevertheless, they are only settings cache files - their purpose should be easily understandable from their names and contents.
From the User's Guide, it seems that all I should need to move between machines to install Cygwin on other machines (And I will need to do this) is the cygcache folder, implying that there'd have been no need to create another folder - and what if I'd entitled my first folder cygwin instead of cygcache? Is there something I will have to do involving moving files from this folder into cygcache?
Nope, they are just cache files.
Finally, I googled for a Cygwin mirror site to get the crypt source (and later did this with the new version of gmp and it's source) and, not sure if these could safely be put into appropriately-named folders in cygcache, I put them in a folder by the name of C:\cygcrypt. This brings up the final question: can I safely put them into cygcache (and delete the older gmp) using Windows Explorer without needing to alter setup.ini or anything before trying to install them? What about after the rest's been installed? Can I just use Windows Explorer (or "My Computer" - or perhaps File Manager, come to think of it) to move them (and some C++ source files of my own) into Cygwin's directory without anything being screwed up or any of Cygwin's system files needing to be altered?
"Cygwin's directory"?
You can safely move them into the place under C:\cygcache corresponding to where they were downloaded from - something like C:\cygcache\release\crypt\ and C:\cygcache\release\gmp\. If you then download an updated copy of setup.ini which knows about these new versions, setup.exe will then see them.
Or, just put them directly into C:\cygcache, and use clean_setup.pl, which will look in setup.ini to see where the files should be, and move them there.
Max.