

Apt-cyg, A command-line software installer for Cygwin - nfnaaron
http://code.google.com/p/apt-cyg/

======
blasdel
Years ago I used to beg for something like this to exist -- I couldn't
understand why Cygwin's setup.exe was so obtuse.

But my boss at my current job showed me a trick that makes it all better: run
setup.exe, click the root checkbox, wait a few minutes for the GUI to start
responding again, and _install everything_.

It's only a few thousand crummy packages, none of which conflict with one
another, only totaling up to a few gigs. It takes all the hassle out of the
process, you never get frustrated that you're missing some package's goddamn
headers -- If you don't have it, it wasn't there, so you can go straight to
upstream without worrying you're doing it wrong.

~~~
rbanffy
It's a waste of space to have everything installed. Besides that, you risk
conflicts with versions of stuff you compile yourself from source.

Package management is a great idea. It's a shame so few OSs have anything like
it.

~~~
jey
Stuff compiled from source should _not_ be installed to the same prefix as
stuff provided by the OS and/or package manager.

For programs that use the de-facto standard GNU Autocrap build system you can
specify this by passing "--prefix=/usr/local" to the "./configure" script.
It's also good to not install everything system-wide, and instead have a
$HOME/bins prefix, with $HOME/bins/bin added to PATH. (And $HOME/bins/lib to
LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and that pkg-config thing if it matters, etc)

~~~
blasdel
FreeBSD takes this a radical step further -- its package system only ever
installs things to /usr/local. Your own random shit needs a third prefix.

It won't even make a /bin/bash -- unless you fuck shit up, everything outside
of /usr/local /home and /root came directly from the FreeBSD project, period.
You can checkout the source to your system's entire userland from one
repository, and build it with one _make_.

I wish there was a nice Linux distro that held itself to this. Gentoo makes a
nice distinction in portage between the necessary _system_ packages that come
built in the tarball and the _world_ packages that you installed and care
about, but it mixes them together in the filesystem.

------
mark_l_watson
Nice: I just installed and played with this for 5 minutes. Assuming no
significant bugs or problems, this is a welcome tool for when I have to use
Windows. (I can't even imagine using Windows without cygwin and a bash shell.)

