Unattended installation of the entire Cygwin build

[Sarah Thompson <thompson at email dot arc dot nasa dot gov>]

Hi all,

I'm currently integrating Cygwin into an automated build environment 
where all installers need to operate entirely unattended. I appreciate 
that setup.exe doesn't yet support this fully, but in the mean time I've 
been attempting to develop a usable workaround.

I did get the sources for setup.exe and managed to build it, but my 
initial attempt to add an --all flag failed -- I got the impression that 
the code was a little unwelcoming to minor alterations. I did get 
further with the following hack:

  1. Download /setup.exe/ from the cygwin web site <http://cygwin.com/>.
  2. Run the installer conventionally, choosing the options for
     downloading to a local directory without installing anything. Make
     sure you have everything set to 'Install' in the choose packages
     page.
  3. Run the following /sed/ script over the downloaded /setup.ini/ file:

cp setup.ini setup.ini-backup  
sed "s/[cC]ategory:.*/Category: Base/" < setup.ini > setup.temp
cp setup.temp setup.ini

This now leaves you with a 'canned' version of Cygwin that will install 
from the command line as follows:

setup.exe -q --local-install --root c:\where\you\want\to\put\cygwin -l c:\path\to\installer\directory

Note that the paths you give to setup.exe need to be Windows paths, 
/not/ Cygwin paths.

The installer seems to work as expected, entirely 'hands-free' 
so-to-speak, installing the entire list of downloaded packages, but for 
some reason it fails to create a home directory for the currently logged 
in user and it fails to source the necessary profiles when Bash is 
started from the short cut, so the path is somewhat minimal and you just 
get a 'bash-3.2$' prompt rather than the usual customised version.

Any help you could give in finding a workaround for this would be 
gratefully appreciated.

Sarah Thompson
NASA Ames Research Center