I used cygwin for the first time since three years ago when it seemed quite different from now. It could have been longer.
I find the intention of the interface commendable but its implementation confusing. Normally, I choose FTP over HTTP for downloading. That's a mistake here, because the cygwin setup UI made me spend 15 minutes choosing and unchoosing. The FTP connection timed out a few times. Setup.exe would not renew the connection. I had to restart setup.exe. So it's pointless to have FTP mirrors when setup.exe make them (to use an oft overused adjective/adverb, virtually) inaccessible. I put on a computer gaming warrior attitude trying to race my selecting/deselecting download items against the FTP time-out (How to play computer games in the office under your bosses' noses without them realising). I finally admitted defeat and switched to HTTP download to enable me to continue towards a more responsible life-style in the office. If you had used real.com starz movie download, you could unselect/cancel items while the download is going on. I had to stop and restart setup.exe a few times yesterday because, I suddenly realised I didn't want gnomes or ghosts which would have increased my download time by a quarter. A HTML set of forms with explanatory links to select/unselect items and then a final checkout list. The checkout list has dependencies listed, with unselected dependencies warnings. Also with file sizes so that I could return to select/unselect to meet my total download size budget I had in mind. ~ I believe in God and his Prophet Charles Darwin ~ -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Dave Korn Sent: Tue, June 14, 2005 11:10 AM To: cygwin-apps@cygwin.com Subject: Setup.exe Hi Max, Brian, et al. (Hi Al!) Is the new version of setup coming from HEAD or from the old release branch? I notice that most of the recent changes appear to be on mainline, but don't know if they're on the branch too. As a side issue, is it really worth releasing from branches for this application? It's not like we want to carry on maintaining old versions for years the way we do with gcc or binutils, so I can't see a great deal of value in it myself, but other people's M may of course V. The reason I ask is because, at least on mainline, I just noticed that the V scrollbar on the chooser page doesn't get resized if you resize the window. (It does if you select any of the radio buttons or expand/contract a tree entry or otherwise provoke a full redraw). Oh, and one other little thing: my expectations were lightly confounded when I ticked the box saying "Hide obsolete and administrative packages", and the "Admin" category remained stubbornly visible at the top of the chooser. Perhaps there's a better word we could use than "administrative"? "Infrastructure", perhaps? <columbo> Oh, there was _just_ _one_ _more_ thing...... </columbo> Selecting (or unselecting) the "Hide obsolete" tickbox resets all your selections in the chooser. I take it this is an inadvertent side-effect rather than a matter of necessity? cheers, DaveK -- Can't think of a witty .sigline today....
