Re: Outlaw Cygwin Install

[rich-paul at rich-paul dot net]

> That works so long as the users come to that site to install and that site
> for support of the install.  The current Cygwin policy is to offer email 
> "support" for software it distributes.  It's impractical to do otherwise.
> Also, the hope is that people who want to add features to anything Cygwin
> offers will do so in the context of the existing facilities.  In this case, 
> the desire is that people will enhance setup vs making some home-grown thing.
> This list would obviously entertain questions on install issues from the
> Cygwin distributed setup, no matter what functionality it has.  So the 
> policy that you see as being not liberal enough is one that merely attempts
> to keep the group focused both in a software development sense and in a 
> support sense.  It doesn't exclude functionality.  It just seeks to add it
> in the framework that exists already.  I hope that makes some sense to you.
> 

Sure.  I don't have a problem with the list policy.  If somebody
got one of my products, hacked or misused it, and then tried to
get me to fix 'bugs', I wouldn't be too friendly.  That's why I
thought a separate list for unsupported uses might be in order. I
didn't intend to criticize.

The reasons I didn't contribute what I'd done back to cygwin are
pretty clear if you've read the thing:  It's a butt ugly hack,
and it's not really general.  It does exactly what I need, but I
suspect that most people don't need that.   Actually, there's a
third reason, which is that when I use this hack, I install a
great deal of non-cygwin software that I have no right to
distribute or contribute, so even if somebody did put similar
functionality into setup.exe, I would probably have to continue
to do an ugly hack on my own.

-- 
Got freedom?  Vote Libertarian:  http://www.lp.org

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