On Wed, May 18, 2005 at 03:04:34PM +0100, Max Bowsher wrote: > Tod Courtney wrote: > >>I appreciate both of your helpful replies. I guessed there would be ways > >>to 'trick' the setup using configuration files and looked a little bit, > >>but > >>hadn't figured out how to do it. I understand both of your answers and > >>will consider them if my patch (see next) takes some time to be accepted. > >> > >>I did determine how to change the setup code in order to set the initial > >>installation mode to 'install' instead of 'default'. Once I found the > >>place, it turned out to be a very small change. Basically I added a new > >>command line option '-I, --install' that installs all available patches, > >>rather than only installing the 'default' patches. > >> > >>The patch is included below. This patch is relative to the HEAD version, > >>but the same patch can be applied to the current release code without any > >>changes. From what I could tell, posting the patch to this list is the > >>appropriate first step to its possible inclusion in the code. I hope the > >>patch can be included, as it will be very helpful to me and my user base, > >>and seems to have a very small probability of introducing problems. > >> > >>If there is a better way to submit this patch, please let me know. > > The patch submission is fine. > > However, I disagree with the concept of the patch. > > In the general case, an 'install all' feature will be almost never useful, > since the Cygwin distribution contains so many packages that it is almost > impossible to want to use every one.
I have to disagree with this disagreement. Having to muck about editing setup.ini shouldn't be necessary. Installing all downloaded packages from a local directory should be easy. > Furthermore, although setup doesn't explicitly implement it (yet) it is > possible for packages to conflict with others - we even have a pair of > packages for which this is the case: only one of tetex-tiny and tetex-base > should ever be installed at a time. Is that documented? I don't use tetex, but have both installed :) How would a package that requires a tetex installation list it's requirement? I see several packages that require tetex-tiny. package tetex's ldesc seems to contradict you: This is teTeX, a TeX distribution for UNIX compatible systems. This virtual tetex package will install tetex-bin and tetex-tiny, the minimal working teTeX setup. It is advised to install tetex-base too. > As I understand it, your use case is that you need a set of packages to > default to "Install". Since you already need to produce a custom setup.ini, > it should be very easy for you to ensure that each of your packages in in > either the "Base" or "Misc" category, which will cause setup to behave as > you want, right now, without a patch. Is there a reason why this technique > is not more useful than a command line option? AFAIK, the only need for a custom setup.ini is to change the category. You ideally should be able to do a "Download Without Installing" of selected packages and just save the Local Package Directory to cd with the full setup.ini as is, and then run setup in a mode to install everything available.