apt-cyg

> Because I got dragged into a time-consuming and unpleasant law suit involving apt-cyg, I am very unlikely to put more time and effort into it anytime soon, even though I won. I write open source software because I enjoy it, not so I can get involved in meaningless conflicts. https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/blob/master/status... I looked but I couldn't find any details.

apt-cyg: https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg

I've also been using Cygwin for 10 years now. It's a bit annoying to install and update it, but it's far from a nightmare :) Just run the setup.exe, click through the 5-10 pages and that's about it. To update package, just run the setup.exe, click through the 5-10 pages and that's about it :) Or use this: https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg (I haven't needed so far, but I've read good reviews about it) Regarding "crash prone", it used to be a bit unstable in the early days of XP, but almost all of them were due to failed updates. And that's where you needed to know a bit of magic, the "rebaseall" thing mentioned by barrkel. I haven't had to do that in a long time. It's a lot more solid that people think it is. I wouldn't run production servers with it (even though I know folks that do...), but for desktop use it's quite robust.

You can't apt-get in cygwin, but you can apt-cyg: https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg

There's also Chocolatey https://chocolatey.org/ and for Cygwin, apt-cyg https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg and even cyg-fast https://github.com/lambdalice/cyg-fast

My biggest gripe with Cygwin (aside performance on some syscalls) has been package management, which used to require setup.exe to add or upgrade packages. That was nicely mitigated when I found out about apt-cyg[1]. It's a apt-getish frontend for setup.exe command line. Not as nice as real apt-get of course, but "apt-cyg install something" takes care of the most important use case. 1: https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg EDIT: changed to github url

I look in on the Cygwin users' mailing list every now and again and I have a lot of respect for the devs and how they run their project, finding a usable middle ground between Windows and Linux (Cygwin at its core is a DLL that emulates POSIX and Linux-specific system calls). The installer being the package manager threw me when I first started using Cygwin. However, when I researched the issue, I can see how the choice made sense. Unlike a Linux system, you can't upgrade the Cygwin DLL in-place while it's running. apt-cyg [1] is a nice simple bash script for managing Cygwin packages. I find very useful for avoiding the GUI installer when I just need to add or remove a few packages. For software that doesn't require an upgrade of the Cygwin DLL, they can be installed / removed from inside Cygwin itself. [1] https://github.com/transcode-o