Re: 30+ reasons why X-Win32 is Better than Cygwin/X

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please at cygwin dot com>]

I didn't read much of this email when I first responded to it since I
suspected that I'd feel compelled to respond and it would interfere with
my "real job".  But, now it's Saturday, so...

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 12:57:53PM -0800, Matthew Johnson wrote:
>>Cygwin/X installs with the cygwin setup and this is fast too.
>
>Not always.  Setup.exe presents a list of mirrors with no commentary
>and not even a _hint_ of which is closest to the user in the Web.  I
>tried 5 or 6 different mirrors in that list before I could find one
>that was "fast too".
>
>That is pretty poor performance.  RedHat should not allow them to
>mirror Cygwin if the mirror will not provide faster response and better
>connectivity.

Red Hat does not control the Cygwin mirror list any more than Red Hat
controls Cygwin.  Cygwin is an all-volunteer project.

Here is how it works: Mirror sites volunteer to mirror the Cygwin
release.  The site is added to the mirror list and, subsequently, a
program checks twice a day to make sure that it and the other sites are
up-to-date.  If a site isn't up-to-date it is dropped from the list.

I can't think of any useful way to determine "faster response and better
connectivity".  If you are in Michigan and you chose a mirror in Brazil,
you'd undoubtedly see poor performance in your download.  If you are on
a network that is being subject to a denial of service, you'd see poor
performance.  There are all sorts of factors which can impact *your*
download performance that have nothing to do with how well-connected the
mirror site is.

I can imagine some kind of system which tries to figure out connectivity
by checking the output of traceroute or some similar utility but I doubt
it would ever be useful.  I've never seen anything like this in any of
the other projects which use mirrors.  If you have a pointer to
something that does this, however, please provide it.

I assume that most users are like me.  They find a mirror which works
for them and they stick with it.  That's what I do with cygwin,
sourceforge, Fedora, etc.

All of that said, however, I'm not a huge fan of setup.exe.  I think
it's UI sucks and I wish someone had the time to provide something
better.

>> > 10      Corporate Tech Support  No      Yes
>> > 11      Corporate Bug Fix Support       No     
>> Yes
>
>[snip]
>
>>Is Cygwin/X worth it's money?  Definitly yes *g*
>
>No, NOT 'definitly [sic] yes'.  It depends on how much your _time_ is
>worth.  If your time is worth little to you, or you already _have_ much
>expertise with X, Cygwin and Cygwin/X, then yes, it is worth it.  But
>if you cannot afford to lose the time grappling with installations that
>do different things on different machines, demanding you rebuild
>password files but then refusing to let you do it etc, or with
>"community support" that consists of answers so terse (and all too
>often rude) they are harder to understand than the original problem
>etc, then no, it is not worth it.

Right.  In open source, people who answer your questions may be as rude
or terse as the people who are asking for help.  The answerers also may
be as clueless as many tech support personnel.  I do think it is pretty
rare for people who are helping to comment on misspellings or bad
grammar, however.  YMMV.

cgf