Hands up those who have tried installing cygwin on windows only to have the damn installer not completely downloading sources or you found that by selecting multiple mirrors, the installer would just get stuck on a slow or buggy mirror?
Well back up a bit.
Hands up those who were *forced* to use windows and hence had to install cygwin?
Me and me again!
At work I am on a windoze box while having to ssh into a linux box to do my development (let us not go there). Luckily cygwin has helped me in the past but only because I managed to complete the installations out of sheer luck. For some reason (may be limited intelligence) I could not select the fastest or the most reliable mirror and the installations kept bombing out after hours of what seemed like progress. Seems wierd but I would have thought the cygwin mirror seeing what files it had already downloaded would have helped. But no such luck (was it some option I missed)?
So I decided to write a downloader myself (you would still have to call the cygwin setup tool to install the sources). It HAD to be stateful. You interrupt it at any point and it should continue where it left of. So out of that came cyginstall.
It also has a few other goodies:
- Multi threaded (defaults to 5)
- Web based UI
- Easily select or deselect mirrors
- Works through proxy with NTLM authentication.
- Better reporting of download status and mirror health.
So please give it a go and let me know what you think. I managed to do a whole download but that does not mean there are no bugs so would appreciate it if you could let me know of any and all issues that need fixing.
Also the UI is very drab. Very basic but drab, so any help or advice there would be gold.
