> > Anyone know of a suitable, free setup-like utility that could be > > pressed into service for use with cygwin? > http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php > Fergus >
I second that emotion. InnoSetup absolutely rocks. What I suspect you're unlikely to find in any of these however is piecemeal installation of stuff over the network. And I'd wager any amount not to exceed $10 that none will ever have any sort of "Current/Prev/Experimental" functionality. Dependencies, I don't know. How about this notion: Every package has its own installer, e.g. CygwinSetup.exe, BashSetup.exe, GCCSetup.exe, BinutilsSetup.exe, Perl... Well, you get the idea. I've gotten rather expert at InnoSetup "metascripting" and could probably write a short perl script to automatically build these from the existing packages. But what to do about dependencies? Off the top of my head: 1. When A requires B and B isn't installed, running Asetup.exe croaks with "You must install B first!". Bad. 2. When A requires B, Asetup.exe contains Bsetup.exe and installs it automatically. Huge files in some cases, probably conflicts, ick. 3. If the setup builder does support install-on-demand over the network, problem probably solved. Pros: - Versioning becomes less of an issue. Every CygwinSetup-1.5.xxxx.exe can be kept around forever if somebody wanted to (actually that's probably a "con" in the long run....). Actual exe/dll versioning gets handled by the installer. - Nobody gets confused. InnoSetup installers are as standard as they come. Cons: - "I just installed all 2MB of CygwinSetup-1.xxx.exe, why can't I compile anything?!?!?". - Tons of xxxSetup.exe's floating around, with no "picker". Maybe that's acceptable though, if a web page(s) get autogenerated with links to the exe and the description. Just a notion, let 'er rip. ;-) -- Gary R. Van Sickle -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
