This is the mail archive of the cygwin@cygwin.com mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: setup.exe 2.218.2.8/9 broken


On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 02:06:36PM -0400, Harig, Mark A. wrote:
>Chuck Wilson wrote:
>>But no, it's not "the solution".  Chris has already added some code
>>that assists setup in parsing only "proper" setup.ini files and
>>skipping non-setup.exe-related ones.
>
>It's the "do not choose" portion of this solution that I hope setup.exe
>would avoid because it isn't paying attention to Murphy's Law.  The way
>setup.exe runs now there are (at least) two possible sources of errors:

IMO, this is an extremely minor issue and one which is easily corrected.

If someone chooses a populated directory to hold their downloaded files
then, well,

<additional observations deleted>

>  2) The user may have selected a Local Package Directory that contains
>non-setup.exe setup.ini files.  The message that is reported for this
>user error (that is, 'user selected a Local Package Directory that has
>non-setup.exe package files in it') is, unfortunately, the same message
>as that used to report problem 1, above.

The user should consider this a valuable learning experience that they
should not be using an existing directory to hold an application's
download files.  This is consistent with the UNIX philsophy of giving
someone enough rope to drown themselves, if they want.

>This can be doubly confusing because a user can run setup.exe
>successfully for a long time, and then find that it stops working due
>to mysterious parsing errors because s/he has installed some other
>package ("I'm keeping all of my installations in a single, separate
>directory tree").
>
>So, even if we add the text you suggested telling the user about the
>rules for 'Local Package Directory', setup.exe should report the error
>better (i.e., not reuse the error processing method of different kind
>of error) when the user doesn't follow the rules.

I don't agree.  However, this is really not worth discussing any
further.  Either someone will provide a patch or they won't.

I'd urge the main setup.exe contributors to continue to work on
important issues and consider this to be extremely low priority if
it actually makes it onto a todo list.

That said, however, if setup.exe is actually *defaulting* to using
an already populated directory, then that is not good.  The default
should be changed.  That should be easy enough to do and easy enough
to confirm.

cgf

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting:         http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]