On Thu, 10 Nov 2016, Brian Inglis wrote:
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2016 02:45:32 -0700
From: Brian Inglis
Subject: Re: Complaining after fair notice of dropping XP support. Was: Not
very nice at all.
On 2016-11-10 00:24, Fergus wrote:
1. Use the following version of setup*.exe:
32-bit:
ftp://www.fruitbat.org/pub/cygwin/setup/snapshots/setup-x86-2.874.exe
2. Run setup*.exe with the -X option, using the following
mirror:
32-bit:
ftp://www.fruitbat.org/pub/cygwin/circa/2016/08/30/104223
Q1 Any ideas of what might be de-railing this simple operation?
See notice on throttling Cygwin Time Machine because of abuse:
http://www.fruitbat.org/Cygwin/timemachine.html
advises using only setup on as few required packages as possible
at a time, until abuse stops.
Greetings, All,
(Time Machine owner/operator here! :-)
Q2 [... virtual(?);] Could one instead use wget on
ftp://www.fruitbat.org/pub/cygwin/circa/2016/08/30/104223?
Brian is correct about robots and LIST, but what he (anyone) doesn't know
is why. I generally keep to myself and don't post non-Cygwin specific
things to this list so I've never really explain why I do what I do.
And, no, it's not "BWJM" (https://cygwin.com/acronyms/#BWAM) either. :)
Wget honours robots.txt, and LIST has been disabled for Cygwin
Time Machine directories, so you can not even see the
directories, and no FTP download requests other than GET will
work.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=lack+of+planning+on+your+part+does+not+constitute+an+emergency&site=imghp&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X
Please remember that both the Cygwin and Time Machine
projects are volunteer efforts with few resources.
Each must manage their projects as best they can fit effort
into their time, and may withdraw their efforts and
facilities at any time.
While it is true I have limited resources, it's unlikely I'll ever
withdraw the Time Machine. I've been doing this for over 10 years and
will continue so until Windows finally becomes Skynet. :-) At that point
I figure we'll all be dead or used as living batteries, so it won't
matter.
Following the mailing lists/groups and participation earlier
could perhaps have delayed the final implementation to allow
more time for people to plan and execute final downloads.
Complaining after advance notice was given publicly and making
could/should have suggestions after the fact is pointless, and
could demotivate the volunteers to drop the projects, make
access private, or charge for it.
Fairly recently, the owner of gmane.org, that many of us had
used to browse and post to mailing lists via the web, shut
down his web site, although he kept his mail-news gateway up.
How many people over the years expressed appreciation for his
free service to the community? Or were gracious when letting
him know his site had a problem. And thanked him when it was
fixed. Not enough probably!
If you, a bunch of Cygwin XP dependents banded together, or
your company have the space, bandwidth, server(s), money to
provide a public mirror of the final Cygwin XP release from
the Time Machine, you could contact the owner and make a
proposal to offload his site, or upgrade his facilities and
help run them.
Ugh. Please don't. I already have plans in motion to move the Time
Machine to a service with greater network bandwidth and I'm really not
willing to consider other options. In the process of that I'll be
restricting the existing site even further to not-so-subtly prod existing
users over to the new system, when it is live. People wanting to make
their own special, private copy really should wait, please, pretty please.
And for those who think keeping a private mirror is trivial, let me give
you some stats. A full snapshot of Cygwin, 32-bit + 64-bit (+noarch) +
source packages (Current and Previous) is about 137Gb. Don't believe me?
Your setup.ini has a size (and a hash) for every package. Add them up
yourself. Now consider that I have about 4000 snapshots (and counting!)
of Cygwin.
Oh! Quick quiz:
What's 137Gb * 4000?
Answer: 535Tb.
Now, do you really think I have that amount of storage? Of course not.
The Time Machine isn't organized like that (don't be silly). It's
currently about 500Gb (which is quite a savings, if you think about it
:-). It is for this reason I won't let webcrawlers on the site. They
would see each "virtual" slice as wholely separate and attempt to pull it
all. That is what was happening before I disabled FTP LIST.
Or your company could ask MS and Redhat for XP and Cygwin XP
support quotes if it has the money ;^>
I see what you did there. Ha Ha. :)
There's an opportunity for some of you XP folks to make
money off the others by providing dedicated repos of
outdated software with support ;^>
If you are working for a company that decided to build products
for XP dependent on Cygwin, maybe it's time to tell them that
Cygwin has reached EOL on the EOL XP.
If you are supporting Cygwin based products on XP, maybe it's
time to tell your customers you can't any longer, as both are
unsupported.
You can download source and binary packages that you need that
predate 2.6 from the Cygwin mirrors, and include all the build
dependencies, starting with cygport.
That will enable you to use setup to download from the Time
Machine only those packages recently updated on Cygwin
mirrors to use 2.6.
That is the best advice I can give anyone. Only take what you really
need. Don't be greedy.
You could run setup unattended installing packages one at a
time, in a loop driven by the packages needed from
installed.db, to honour the site owner's request.
You will then be in a position to monitor upstream sources,
so you can download new upstream patches and releases as
they become available, so you have and can apply them when
needed, to rebuild the updated packages.
You could also try upgrading to W10 and working with single
user Ubuntu under WSL ;^>
--
--=> Peter A. Castro
Email: doctor at fruitbat dot org / Peter dot Castro at oracle dot com
"Cats are just autistic Dogs" -- Dr. Tony Attwood
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