Message-ID: <a71bd89a0803181415w18070c8u59c3091defcb1a5b@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:15:58 -0700
From: "Dan Kegel" <dank AT kegel DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: FAQ suggestion
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The last company I worked for tried bundling Cygwin (with sources, natch)
as part of a product.  Predictably (to those who have tried this),
this caused big problems because it conflicted with any Cygwin
installed on customers' machines.

Looking at the archives, I see at least a couple other people have
tried to do this,  e.g.
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-10/msg00625.html
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-10/msg00650.html
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2007-03/msg00862.html

but the Cygwin developers always reply with
"Don't do that.  There can be only one instance of cygwin."

I'd like to see an FAQ entry about this, e.g.

http://cygwin.com/faq/faq.programming.html#faq.bundled.cygwin

--- snip --
Q. I want to bundle Cygwin with a product, and ship it to customer
sites.  How can I do this without conflicting with any Cygwin
installed by the user?

A.  Cygwin is not designed for this; the developers
official position is that there should be only one instance of
cygwin on any system, and that it should be updated
to the latest version constantly.   So please don't try.
It will only bring you grief.

What, you're still here?  Move on to the next question,
nothing to see here.

Oh, ok. If you want to do it anyway, one way to do it is to
change four places in the Cygwin source tree and
rebuild from scratch, then ship both source and binary of
Cygwin with your product.  The four places are:
- change the updater to point to your own update server, or disable it
- change the name of the shared/common memory area
- change the location in the registry where Cygwin settings are kept
- rename the cygwin1.dll (such that all apps you build know the new name)
It's a daunting prospect.  One can imagine a shell script that
automates producing such a modified version of Cygwin,
but nobody has written one yet.
--- snip ---

How's that look?  Corrections welcome.
- Dan

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