Hi, there is a certainly a good historical reason why cygwin installer has so many options. But now one-click installers are so common (Google Chrome is the best example), it may look rather scary, especially for beginners.
I did browse a bit though cygwin source code and well, I'm not so great at C++, that I could help in any meaningful way. Though I did make a script that downloads and extract list of cygwin packages (Python>=3.3, because of `.xz` files): https://github.com/iljau/cyg_fetcher/blob/master/fetch_package_list.py Didn't quite get to installation part, yet. Based on my cygwin usage (installing and updating it on multiple machines) and during process of writing above script I discovered following: 1) Usually I want to "Install from Internet" 2) Usually "C:\cygwin" is where I want to install it for "All Users". 3) "Local Package Directory" could be just environment variable %TMP% or %TEMP%. (Still don't understand difference) 4) Usually "Direct connection" is good. 5) The most reliable mirror is (and the only one that supports https): https://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin/ 6) Usually I dont want to "Create Icons", especially after update. So there are multiple possibilities to provide reasonable defaults and spare users from confusion. That's probably why MSYS2 is being developed: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Preparation/Windows/MSYS2 Thank you for your attention. -- Ilja Umov https://iljau.me -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
