On 16/12/2025 18:22, Soren via Cygwin wrote:
Hello Jon, Cygwinstas,
I am attempting to operate setup.exe by commandline arguments and what I'd
like to have happen, doesn't. In advance, sorry to bore readers if this is
an often-discussed issue or whatever. The point I want to make is that
`--packages' does not seem to work as how it's documented.
First I tried building this pipeline (I am not a shell genius, but I get by
...anyway, improvement suggestions welcome):
cygcheck -e 'perl-pod-*' | sed -ne 's/\s:.\+//p' | xargs | sed -ne 's/
/,/gp' |
tee Documents/script-data/CygwinPodDists.lst
Tmpfile Documents/script-data/CygwinPodDists.lst now contains:
perl-Pod-Coverage,perl-Pod-Coverage-TrustPod,perl-Pod-Escapes,perl-Pod-Eventual,perl-Pod-LaTeX,perl-Pod-Markdown,perl-Pod-Parser,perl-Pod-Perldoc,perl-Pod-Plainer
...which ought to be valid arguments for --packages
However, what I intended to have happen does not. Even when I simplify it
to offer only a single package name it does not do the right thing:
$ "/cygdrive/c/Program Files/setup-x86_64.exe" -q --download --root
C:\ix\cygwin --local-package-dir "C:/Users/soren/cygDL.dir" --site
https://cygwin.mirror.constant.com --include-source --packages
"perl-Pod-Eventual"
What DOES it do? It downloads all (AFAICT) of base cygwin!:
$ find cygDL.dir/ -type f
cygDL.dir/https%3a%2f%2fcygwin.mirror.constant.com
%2f/noarch/release/base-cygwin/base-cygwin-3.8-2-src.tar.xz
cygDL.dir/https%3a%2f%2fcygwin.mirror.constant.com
%2f/noarch/release/base-cygwin/base-cygwin-3.8-2.tar.xz
cygDL.dir/https%3a%2f%2fcygwin.mirror.constant.com
%2f/noarch/release/base-files/base-files-4.3-3-src.tar.zst
cygDL.dir/https%3a%2f%2fcygwin.mirror.constant.com
%2f/noarch/release/base-files/base-files-4.3-3.tar.zst
... etc etc ...
Is setup in fact trying to fulfill all the dependency prerequisits for
"perl-Pod-Eventual"?!? As a write this, that just occured to me. Sure
enough:
Yeah, specifying '--packages foo' doesn't mean "only install foo",
because that would probably be useless, but "add foo to installation."
What you'll get is the union of:
* all base packages
* foo
* the recursive dependencies of foo
This hopefully results in 'foo' working.
Of course, setup shouldn't download and install things which are already
installed, but if the root and local package directory specified are
empty, what you describe is expected.
All of which isn't to say there isn't a bug here, or there's something
less surprising we could do, because this code isn't too clever, but
more details are required to make that determination.
And couldn't setup print SOMETHING to the console to mark the operation of
fetching each package, so that the user has some idea of what it's doing?
That would be really sweet.
Unfortunately, setup disconnects from the terminal when it elevates
for administrator privileges.
Maybe this is a misfeature, but I suspect it's unavoidable.
You can use -B/--no-admin, or run in an already elevated session to
avoid that. Adding -v/--verbose will produce lots of pointless debug output.
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