In my last post, I made a passing reference to an annoyance with Cygwin's setup.exe program. First of all, though, I want to say that, by and large, I love Cygwin. It makes life livable in Windows-land. The ability to run a full Linux-esque command line environment alongside the rest of Windowsland is absolutely wonderful. But I have a couple of gripes (the other one being that man pages load slowly; come on, it's just some possibly compressed text being filtered through some troff macros and piped to a pager; what's the deal?). The most important being the setup.exe utility. Cygwin uses one application as both its setup utility and its package manager. On the surface this has some nice symmetry and you only have to develop one app. Win, right? Well, not if you have to use it semi-regularly.
The biggest thing is that you MUST go through the menus selecting your download path, your line encodings, your mirror, and redownload setup.bz2. The repetitiveness is slow. Then you get to the package list and they have this tree structure that you have to muck around in. Unless you go ahead and set view to full and check "Keep" (because, if I want one package, I don't want to upgrade every package in the system while I am at it). Then I have to scroll through a mile long list (the problem that the tree structure exacerbates) and find the package. Why?! This little ritual is time consuming but, more to the point, it is outrageously annoying. I only actually switched line encodings on a Cygwin install once (a few years ago)--and it was by accident and promptly jacked up X (it turns out, on Cygwin, that changing line encoding throws X fonts completely out of whack; beautiful). Now, of course, I simply leave everything on Unix and use a translation utility when necessary, which isn't that often as the applications I would run on Windows text files (most especially vim) handle the line encoding difference automatically. But I have to click through the option EVERY TIME! What would be really, really nice is having the setup.exe for those who want it, but providing an apt-get-like interface with all those options stashed, from install, in a conf file. That way, I could type something like:
$ cyg-get install openssh
It turns out, I'm not the only one to ever think this, either. Someone else wrote a cyg-apt in Python. Kudos to the author, but why does he have to do this anyway? And why isn't it an official part of the project?