fergus wrote:
> if I want to install a version of Cygwin without user
> interaction (optimally just dropping a bunch of files
> via unzip), is that feasible?
I do this frequently in order to have Cygwin on a USB stick. Building it
there using setup would take 2 days (even though it's USB2.0). Copying
an existing architecture to it takes less than an hour. It works
perfectly, scores of times.
Build your preferred version on a host machine. Then Yes, as long as the
zipped package that you are copying from host to target is capable of
preserving the +R and +S attributes that will be attached to some of the
individual files.
> In particular: does setup.exe fiddle with the registry
> or other files that can't be just overwritten as a whole?
Mainly (entirely?) setup sees to (a) location and (b) mounts. The first
(a) is attended to by the fact that you are copying a completely
specified architecture from host to target. However (b) you do need to
remount your installation once it's in place. You could achieve this
with a single once-only .bat command tacked on to the un-zipping process.
> Obviously, one might want to have PATH adjusted, but apart
> from that?
Why? If your PATH e.g.
/home/user/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
(or whatever) works on the host, why would you want to change it on the
target?
After it's done you might want to fiddle with mkpasswd or mkgroup for
individual users on their individual machines, but it's my experience*
that you wouldn't actually need to.
* What Works For Me might not, for You. And I might have misunderstood
what you want.
And, as has been pointed out before, using '(win)zip' for this is playing
with fire. A better recipe was posted by Chris Faylor just a few weeks
ago. Obviously, anyone is free to use whatever method they want to install
and/or replicate their Cygwin environment. But the only _supported_ install
procedure is to use 'setup.exe'.
I'm not sure why 'setup.exe' would take significantly longer to install than
a copy when it comes to putting it on a USB drive (never tried it).
Obviously, you'd skip the download part and install from a previously
downloaded local directory of packages (that got created when you installed
Cygwin on the source machine).
--
Larry Hall http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc. (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
216 Dalton Rd. (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746
_____________________________________________________________________
A: Yes.
> Q: Are you sure?
>> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
>>> Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?
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