On 16/01/2022 13:46, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 12:45:06PM +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On Jan 14 10:54, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
On Fri, 14 Jan 2022 at 09:05, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On Jan 13 15:13, Jon Turney wrote:
Show a MessageBox warning if we are running on a Windows version which
we have deprecated Cygwin support for:
- Windows 6.0 (Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008)
- 32-bit Windows
This warning can be disabled with '--allow-unsupported-windows'.
---
Notes:
Not sure if this is needed, or maybe this is just annoying to the ~3% of
users who are running effected OSes. But maybe we want to annoy them
into doing something about it?
Question is, how often should setup show this message? Every time might
really be a bit annoying. Some kind of "I saw it, now leave me alone,
at least for a while" kind of function would be great.
Eh. The installer tries to add icons to my desktop every time I run it
unless I provide a command-line argument every time. This behaviour
seems no more or less annoying to me, and I think having users see
that warning is much more important than adding a desktop icon.
Point.
Perhaps more constructively: I've become inured to the bits of setup's
behaviour that I find annoying, and I've created my own workarounds
(specifically, a bash function that wraps setup and automatically
provides a bunch of arguments, including `-d` to avoid adding icons I
don't want). I expect most people who are using setup have also become
inured to these annoyances, and I don't think adding this additional
warning is a significant additional annoyance.
That said, just because I've become inured to these annoyances, doesn't
mean we* couldn't do better. In particular, I think a lot of the parts
of the setup UI you have to go through every time could more usefully be
hidden after a user has gone through them once, and only displayed again
if (a) the user requested that with a command-line option, (b) the
options have legitimately changed, or possibly (c) the user clicks (say)
an "Advanced mode" button on the first page of the installer.
In particular, I expect the installer would be that bit friendlier to
most users if the default behaviour were as if `-Mn` were specified by
default every time after the first run.
This is obviously well outside the scope of the immediate conversation,
but I thought it worth revisiting the topic with a more constructive
view, rather than my initial slightly grumpy reaction.
Adam
* I say "we" here; I sadly do not have the bandwidth for committing to
working on even small enhancements to setup's usability. The perennial
open source issue: someone has to do it, and I have far too many other
things to spend time on...
This reminds me: It's probably useful for me to support 32-bit even
after Cygwin no longer does for my commercial project(s). Which probably
means I should release said package soon (I couldn't get the rebase to
work on 32-bit before, will ask another question soon. Are all the
32-bit packages going offline after support ends or will it remain as a
kind of graveyard?
Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty
