David Antliff wrote: > I have found some serious issues with Cygwin 1.5 that I want to test > against in the 1.7 beta, before I commit to abandoning 1.5. > > Is it possible to install Cygwin 1.7 on the same PC/filesystem as > Cygwin 1.5, yet maintain absolute independence between the two > versions? > > I don't want the 1.7 install to change anything in my existing 1.5 > install, as I need my 1.5 functional for other purposes.
Yes, the current setup-1.7.exe supports side-by-side install mode, and once set up that way the two installations are entirely independent of each other. > Is it a simple matter of installing to a different path (e.g. > c:\cygwin1.7), or will the 1.7 install overwrite anything (e.g. > environment variables, registry entries) that 1.5 might require? It is moderately tricky. The standard behaviour of setup.exe is to upgrade your 1.5 installation in-place; the side-by-side mode was only intended for beta-testing(*). You get precisely one chance and once chance only to make setup-1.7 perform a parallel installation for you. The very first time you ever run it you must select a new installation dir, and a new local package cache dir, and successfully make it to the end of the installation run *without ever pressing back or canceling out and restarting*. (If you don't get it right first time, it probably is actually possible to get it to give you another chance, but I don't know exactly how the mechanism works so I'm not sure whether it's a registry key that you'd have to find and delete or if it writes something into /etc/last-whatever.) cheers, DaveK -- (*) - The current plan I think is to withdraw the side-by-side install facility when 1.7 leaves beta and 1.5 is officially retired (although I could be misremembering. Actually, I think we should probably leave it in, or maybe even make it a user-visible check-box. However I haven't thought this idea through yet, maybe there's a problem with it. -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple