> Sisyphus wrote: > Hi, > On the face of it, the topic of this post has little (if anything) to > do with perl. > > But, afaict from 'perldoc perlhack', if I want to stay in touch with > the current perl developments I need to be able to download the > latest source by running: > > rsync -avz rsync://public.activestate.com/perl-current/ >
As was pointed out to me (off-list) the above command will result in a list of files, but none of those files will be downloaded. A trailing " ." is needed if the files are to be downloaded to the cwd. I got bitten by that. (That was my first mistake.) I ran it without the trailing " ." (as perl 'perldoc perlhack') ... saw the list of files, and spent a good few minutes trying to work out where the hell they had been placed :-) Someone had sent me a self-contained rsync package that seemed to work quite well (once I got the command sorted out). That package came with its own cygwin dll, so I deduced it was in fact a cygwin build, and that if I was going to use Cygwin's rsync, I might as well incorporate it into my Cygwin installation. (That was my second mistake.) I finally realised that the list of available Cygwin packages I had been looking at contained only the packages that I had already downloaded and stored locally. The 'rsync' package wasn't listed there simply because I had never downloaded it !! So ... I eventually got round to re-running Cygwin's Setup.exe - the aim being to install both git and rsync into Cygwin. Unfortunately I selected "Install from internet" instead of just downloading the files into my local folder and then installing from that local folder. (That was my third mistake.) I expected that "Install from internet" was simply going to install 'rsync' and 'git' - since (I thought) that was all I was asking it to do. (That was my fourth mistake.) Instead it started installing packages (such as perl) that I already had. Unfortunately, part of the way through, the process hanged ... so I hit the "Cancel" button. (That would have been my fifth mistake, except that I don't see that I had any other option.) I then found that things like running 'perl -V' from the Cygwin shell died (with errors that I can no longer recall). Only thing I could then think of doing was to try another total "Install from internet" from a different mirror - which I did. But ... apparently, if you cancel a Setup.exe installation before it has completed ( as I had done), then the next time you run Setup.exe you're liable to get a segmentation fault part way through (which is exactly what happened to me). I've since found that there's a patched Setup.exe (that doesn't suffer this affliction) available from http://rapidshare.com/files/98717404/setup.exe By this time I couldn't even open up Cygwin's bash shell ... so I simply deleted everything to do with Cygwin and started again from scratch, making sure to install both rsync and git. That seems to have worked quite well, except that I've now got a lot of stuff to rebuild (unless I can "Restore" it from the "Recycle Bin" - to where the original installation was sent.) Now this sort of experience is pretty much standard for me wrt Cygwin ... which is the reason that I try to avoid it wherever possible. Had I have known about the source snapshots (tarballs) available at http://public.activestate.com/pub/apc/perl-current-snap/ , I wouldn't even have bothered with rsync to begin with. Thanks to all respondents, btw. It's to be noted that, with your assistance, and despite my own inadequacies, I have actually managed to get there in the end. (It now just remains for me to determine exactly where "there" is :-) Cheers, Rob _______________________________________________ Perl-Win32-Users mailing list Perl-Win32-Users@listserv.ActiveState.com To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs
