Re: setup redownloads everything all the time, including the packages list, and also has a foolish UI

[Csaba Raduly <rcsaba at gmail dot com>]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 1:46 PM, Leif W wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Sep 2004 16:14:09 +0100, Dave Korn  wrote:
>>   By design, setup searches through all the download directories, keeps
>> track of all the versions, should know exactly what you've already got and
>> never re-download something you already have; if it ever does, it's a bug.
>>
>>   There is one caveat: if setup dies - actually crashes or is killed -
>> part-way through downloading a whole series of packages, it may not have
>> updated its catalog by the time it gets terminated, and so it might
>> download
>> them again.  But once setup has downloaded and exited successfully, it
>> should know and remember what it's done and not do it again.
>
> Trying to compile various programs while installing the absolute minimum
> required.  I install the compiler for the language, attempt compilation,
> make note of failures (i.e. missing libraries, etc), and then run setup
> again (usually 30 seconds from the previous run).
>
> Run setup again, install from local disk?  That does not make sense, to
> install things which have not been downloaded.  So I choose install from
> internet, which re-downloads everything.  It is not clear from the user
> interface or from the options or from the FAQ, exactly what the behavior is
> intended to be.
>
> Setup re-downloads the entire 2MB packages file every single time.

It has to do this; the packages file might have changed since the previous run.

> Ignoring
> for a moment the great difficulty of use of the poorly designed Setup GUI,
> it appears to remember to "keep" what I already have.  But then it proceeds
> to re-download everything I already have, in addition to whatever new things
> I have selected.

This has never happened to me, and I used setup.exe daily for six
years in the past.

(snip)
> In other cases, the poorly designed GUI has such insane usability issues,
> and often does crash.

This has never happened to me.

> Subsequent runs of setup starts in the "Pending"
> list, which is empty.

This is to be expected, if you re-run setup 30 seconds after the previous run.
"Pending" shows the packages that have been updated in the repository
since the last run of setup. For people who don't want to install new
packages but want to update their existing Cygwin installation, this
is the most interesting information.

> Must mouse click to the drop-down box, and choose
> something sane, like category.  Click a category to expand it, now what you
> want is several screens down.

This is indeed the Cygwin developers' fault for supporting too many packages :)
You should choose a package earlier in the alphabet.
</sarcasm>

(snip)
> This app would have been ahead of it's time, if it was invented in the
> 1980s, but was barely acceptable back in the 1990s.  20+ years have passed,
> and there has been zero progress in the installation process, design,
> usability or robustness.

This is just plain not true. That drop-down is a recent (August 2016)
usability improvement; before that you had to cycle between
"Category", "Full" and "Pending" by repeatedly clicking on a button.

(snip)

You should read "How to report bugs effectively"
(http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html)
especially the second chapter ("It doesn't work").

Csaba
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