I updated my cygwin the other day, as I periodically do, and I am very sorry I did so. Here are some of the problems I have encountered.
1) Couldn't start cygwin X at all. The link on my desktop pointed to a script (which I had customized) in /usr/X11R6/bin, which was deleted by the upgrade. It took me a while to find the replacement -- mysteriously moved to /usr/bin, minus my customizations. 2) Fonts I had added no longer work. Everything looks fine in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts. Messed around there for a while, to no avail. After much Googling, found that the fonts have been moved to /usr/share/fonts. 3) While trying to figure out why my fonts weren't working, I naturally tried to use xfontsel. "bash: xfontsel: command not found". WHAT?! It turns out that it's now in its own cygwin package, as are about a billion other useful utilities that have been deleted without warning. 4) xterms all now have a useless, annoying menu at the top. I want to make it go away. Had to wade through the xterm manual to learn that this is apparently called a "toolbar" and is now on by default. I am extremely annoyed. I have lost many hours of productivity just trying to get back to where I was on Monday, and I'm still not there. The worst part of it is that I (and probably most cygwin users out there) was completely blindsided, and there was no post-upgrade help to be found. What's on the "news" page at cygwin.com? A kernel upgrade in June. Before that, a kernel upgrade in May, and one in March. Nothing new in the FAQ. No announcement of a change that's going to screw up your whole system. At x.cygwin.com, things are even worse. "Last updated: 2004-01-10 0200 EST (Harold L Hunt II)". Not helpful. There is a short note at the bottom of the main page directing people to the mailing list announcement. It contains useful information such as "before you upgrade, do this and that and the other thing". Wish I had known about some of those before I upgraded! It also notes without explanation that most programs are in their own packages now. This is terribly inconvenient to us ordinary users. My xterms are screwed up. Numlock is very wonky: Let's say I start off with numlock on; I am in a Windows (non-X) window; I switch to an xterm; I use the numeric keypad to type; I get nothing (tildes, escape codes, non-numlock crap). I switch to another xterm, I type on the keypad, I get digits. I switch back to the first xterm, it's still acting as though numlock is off. I switch to a Windows window, then back to the first xterm. Now it behaves as though numlock is on. I switch to the second xterm window, *it* is behaving as though numlock is off. All this time, the numlock LED is lit. I can consistently repeat this. xfontsel is broken. The main part of the window does not redraw itself when dropdown menus disappear, so you wind up with large portions of old menus cluttering the client area. Several of the fonts are rendered with a broken, crappy look. As far as I can tell, this is not a problem with the font iself -- but who knows! I am sure that the cygwin X developers put a great deal of time and effort into this upgrade. And I honestly appreciate the work that they do. Being a contributor to open-source software myself, I can appreciate what they go through. But this upgrade was surely poorly thought-out. I am not a cygwin developer; I am not really even a cygwin power user, although I will not -- cannot -- use Windows without cygwin. So I am not subscribed to the cygwin mailing lists. I just run setup.exe periodically to get patches. It should not have re-architected my whole damn system without warning. Eric -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ FAQ: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/
