Re: Customizable cygwin setup.exe

[Miles Gazic <miles dot gazic at gmail dot com>]

> it probably would have been better to have checked here
> first before going to such effort.
Sorry, when I investigated this originally, the -p option didn't exist
in the mainstream setup.exe.  I found a patch that did it, edited it
slightly to work with the latest rev of setup.exe (at the time
setup-2.573.2.2), checked it in to my local branch, and never
attempted to submit it (because at that time the patch was already
available on the mailing list, and people had purposely decided not to
integrate it).  Just dug it up now because I quit my job, and I'll
never be looking at this code again, and thought someone might find it
useful.

> Even if you don't want to use the command-line options, rewriting
> setup.exe is really not the way to do this.  That's just...  just... wrong.
Yes, editing object code with regular expressions is generally a very
bad thing, I didn't mean to imply otherwise.  However, it allows the
easy creation of a custom setup.exe binary that requires no manual
interaction to install cygwin.  Believe it or not, I've worked at two
companies now where people were unwilling to follow simple
instructions on how to install cygwin manually, and also got confused
when I gave them two files (1 - the setup.exe, 2 - the script that
invokes it).  I quit the first job, then accidentally stumbled into
the second thinking it'd be an improvement (it wasn't), and just quit
that job earlier today.  I don't intend to work at another company
that requires that level of coddling, but I figure someone else
probably does, and they are probably very frustrated when their
coworkers tell them cygwin is too hard to install.

If you'd like to host the perl script and modified setup.exe on a
server somewhere, you could very easily have a web page deliver
customized setup.exes to any poor shmuck that is trying to evangelize
cygwin to people who are unwilling to do more than double-click an
icon to install it.  The world would be a better place if this wasn't
necessary, but in my experience it has been.

- Miles