search

fdopen / opam-repository-mingw

windows package repository for OPAM (mingw and msvc)
https://fdopen.github.io/opam-repository-mingw/
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
96 stars 33 forks source link

Suggestion: bundle Cygwin packages with the graphical installer #44

Closed keleshev closed 6 years ago

keleshev commented 6 years ago

A small suggestion is to bundle the Cygwin packages together with the installer and then install them using setup-x86.exe --quiet-mode --local-package-dir=..., instead of prompting the user to select a mirror (some of them don't work, sometimes FTP is blocked, etc.).

My hope for the graphical installer is to be the easy-mode installer, where a user doesn't need to bother with these details.

fdopen commented 6 years ago

Some packages must be updated regularly. If the package with certificates is too old, https could fail. A Windows 10 update might even break cygwin itself (it already happened in the past). I don't have the time to monitor such issues and react instantly. And if bundled packages are too old, you could get problems in a later step, e.g. when depext-cygwinports tries to install additional packages (autoconf, pkg-config,...). cygwin's setup utility doesn't work well. Managing and enforcing version constraints is beyond its capabilities.

However, I've now tweaked the call of setup-x86_64.exe a little bit. If the default mirror also used by https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-ci-scripts is online, cygwin's setup won't ask for anything.