[osgeo4w-dev] feedback on osgeo cygwin setup

[Matt Wilkie]

Hello everyone, it's wonderful see this project getting started!

I've read through the archives and like what I see so far. I personally 
don't like the cygwin setup gui very much for the reasons Frank covered 
already (too many choices, hard to pick groups), but my main peeve is 
that the packages aren't searchable or filterable (e.g. type in a few 
characters and see all matching packages). What I really like about 
cygwin setup is that downloading all the packages *without* installing 
and saving to disc to install from another machine is trivial. My 
favourite package manager is apt-get, but using it in this manner is not 
so straightforward.

This brings me to cyg-apt, a very cool script which brings an apt-get 
feel to cygwin. Perhaps it can be used here too.
The script: http://lilypond.org/~janneke/software/cyg-apt
How to use it (very end of page): 
http://software.jessies.org/salma-hayek/cygwin-setup.html

I see from the archive that Frank's intention for osgeo's cygwin 
setup.exe[*] is to install native win32 programs and not cygwin emulated 
binaries. There is going to be some confusion here. When I run 
osgeo-setup on my machine which has cygwin installed it wants to reuse 
the cygwin cache directory and install to C:\cygwin. Also in the list of 
packages it shows me currently installed cywgin packages (as 'keep') and 
the new ones (as 'to install') are not obviously related to osgeo (curl, 
libexpat, textreplace, zlib, xerces). And yes I selected the osgeo 
mirror to download from.

When I next run cygwin setup.exe the situation is reversed with default 
cache and install directory set to what I typed for osgeo last time.

[*] Please rename to osgeo-setup.exe to avoid confusion. I've done this 
locally and it doesn't complain.


A native windows program for commandline updating and installing windows 
programs from the internet which I've recently encountered is Appupdater
http://www.nabber.org/projects/appupdater/
It has a bug with not always properly quoting paths, but is easy to 
workaround and I assume will be easy to fix also. There is a primitive 
gui, not pretty but easily understandable.  I see a linux version noted 
on their package installer comparison page but not download package (I 
didn't look very hard). 
http://www.nabber.org/projects/appupdater/compare.html

cheers,

-- 
matt wilkie
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