On 23/01/2014 14:36, Warren Young wrote: > On 1/22/2014 18:13, Christopher Faylor wrote: >> If you were actually volunteering to do something then it wasn't made >> clear by your long email or in your lack of response to Larry's SHTDI. > > I'm not going to volunteer until I have some concept of the scope of work, > and some idea of how you'd want the problem solved. That's why it would have > been better if your reply had given me some guidance. > > Maybe I should be flattered that you think I can just jump into the middle of > the single most complicated part of setup.exe, its very core, and not only > figure out a way to solve my issue, but to actually solve it in a way that's > going to be accepted.
I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong, but I suspect the problem with maintenance/extension of setup.exe is twofold: firstly, it's a non-Cygwin program and secondly it is large and not well structured. Also, the original implementer/maintainer has long since left the Cygwin community. One solution to this would be to reimplement it as two separate parts - a non-Cygwin envelope (which could even be installed as an msi) and a Cygwin-based package maintainer. The Cygwin-based part would be a completely separate Cygwin installation, with its own cygwin1.dll, and a minimal set of utilities, and would not interfere with the main installation. The non-cygwin wrapper would simply install/update this mini-Cygwin system and invoke the Cygwin-based package maintainer. The package maintainer would be based on the existing setup.exe, and would benefit from being able to take advantage of the Cygwin layer - in particular that would remove the need to back-port Cygwin knowledge into the various filesystem-related components of setup.exe such as tar. Indeed, the package maintainer need not have a built-in tar as it could use (a private copy of) the main Cygwin tar utility. As I see it the main downside of this is the problem of implementing a windows GUI in a Cygwin program without the overhead of using X. It would be a lot of work to get there - but once in place I imagine there would be a lot more volunteer effort to maintain/improve it. And no - sorry, I'm not offering to do any of the work. It would be fun but I just haven't the time. -- Cliff -- 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
