> it probably would have been better to have checked here > first before going to such effort. Sorry, when I investigated this originally, the -p option didn't exist in the mainstream setup.exe. I found a patch that did it, edited it slightly to work with the latest rev of setup.exe (at the time setup-2.573.2.2), checked it in to my local branch, and never attempted to submit it (because at that time the patch was already available on the mailing list, and people had purposely decided not to integrate it). Just dug it up now because I quit my job, and I'll never be looking at this code again, and thought someone might find it useful.
> Even if you don't want to use the command-line options, rewriting > setup.exe is really not the way to do this. That's just... just... wrong. Yes, editing object code with regular expressions is generally a very bad thing, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. However, it allows the easy creation of a custom setup.exe binary that requires no manual interaction to install cygwin. Believe it or not, I've worked at two companies now where people were unwilling to follow simple instructions on how to install cygwin manually, and also got confused when I gave them two files (1 - the setup.exe, 2 - the script that invokes it). I quit the first job, then accidentally stumbled into the second thinking it'd be an improvement (it wasn't), and just quit that job earlier today. I don't intend to work at another company that requires that level of coddling, but I figure someone else probably does, and they are probably very frustrated when their coworkers tell them cygwin is too hard to install. If you'd like to host the perl script and modified setup.exe on a server somewhere, you could very easily have a web page deliver customized setup.exes to any poor shmuck that is trying to evangelize cygwin to people who are unwilling to do more than double-click an icon to install it. The world would be a better place if this wasn't necessary, but in my experience it has been. - Miles