Cygwin repository partial mirroring tool

pmcyg is a tool for creating customized collections of Cygwin packages, intended to support construction of a portable self-contained CDROM or DVD that can be used as an offline Cygwin installer on computers that do not have network access to a Cygwin mirror site.

pmcyg avoids having to download the entirety of a Cygwin release (about 20GB or more), and can create a minimal Cygwin installation within 40MB. In general, pmcyg will take a user-supplied list of cygwin package names, work out which other packages they depend on, and only download those packages from a user-selected Cygwin mirror site. It will then assemble a set of configuration files that allows the Cygwin installer to operate from the locally created repository.

Licensing

All files forming part of pmcyg are released under the GNU General Public License (v3) (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses) and are Copyright 2009-2023 RW Penney

Installation

To run pmcyg, you will need to have a recent version of Python installed (note that this should be Python-3.6 or later). This should be available by default on most GNU/Linux systems, or can be obtained from https://www.python.org

In order to use pmcyg as a graphical (GUI) application, you will need the 'Tkinter' toolkit for Python. This is part of the default distribution of Python for Windows platforms, but may be part of a separate package (possibly called "python3-tk") on Unix/Linux systems.

On Windows platforms, double-clicking on the file 'pmcyg.py' should be sufficient to run pmcyg in graphical mode.

On Unix/Linux systems, you may prefer to rename 'pmcyg.py' to '/usr/local/bin/pmcyg'. The accompanying Makefile will do this automatically if you execute 'make install'. Running pmcyg without any command-line options will automatically start the GUI if the 'Tkinter' package is available.

Usage

pmcyg can be used either as an interactive graphical application, or via a command-line interface suitable for use in scripts or batch processes.

Graphical mode

The GUI consists of three main sections:

• Editable fields for specifying the locations of Cygwin sources, etc. (Top)
• Buttons for controlling the download process (Top right edge)
• A status window for monitoring the status of the downloads (Bottom).

In the top section of the window, you can optionally select a file containing a list of Cygwin packages that you want to download, and there is a pull-down menu of Cygwin mirror sites from which you can select a site that is geographically close to you. The list of mirror sites is automatically populated by querying the master Cygwin site, so may take a few seconds to become fully populated after pmcyg is started.

The three buttons on the top-right edge of the GUI have the following functions:

• The top button affects how pmcyg treats outdated versions of Cygwin packages when updating a previous set of downloads. You can toggle between: keeping both old & new versions; being asked whether to delete old versions; or having old versions automatically deleted.
• The middle button allows you to select all available Cygwin packages for download (globe icon), or just the subset of packages specified in your custom package list (sector icon).
• The bottom button is used to start the download, or to cancel downloading.

The pull-down menus on the top of the GUI allow additional customization of the download process (e.g. including package sources), and to generate a template list of available Cygwin packages that you can customize to contain only the packages you require.

Command-line mode

When running in command-line mode (using the -c or --nogui options), pmcyg will use default values for a Cygwin mirror site, and a minimal list of packages to download. A full list of options can be obtained via

pmcyg --help

A list of Cygwin mirror sites is available at http://cygwin.com/mirrors.html You should try to use a mirror site close to your geographical location, using the -m or --mirror option, to avoid overloading the primary Cygwin distribution site.

If you simply want to download all the available Cygwin packages, you can run with the -a or --all options. Alternatively, you can supply one or more files containing lists of packages you would like to download, e.g.

pmcyg --nogui --mirror http://NearbyMirroLocation/pub/cygwin mypackages.txt

To create a package-list file, you may want to start with a template generated by the -g or --generate-template option.

Other options that may be useful are the --dry-run option, which can be used to check your package list, and estimate how much space it would require to download all the selected packages. If you want to download to a directory other than the default location you can choose a different area for the local cache with the command-line option --directory. If you want to download 64-bit versions of the Cygwin packages, you can use --cygwin-arch x86_64.

General

In both GUI and command-line modes, you can create a text file containing a list of names of Cygwin packages that you would like to have available. An official list of packages is provided at http://cygwin.com/packages, or you can use pmcyg to generate a template text-file that you can manually edit. In order to use this facility, you need to point pmcyg at a Cygwin mirror site. In the GUI this is done by using the 'Mirror list' button on the main panel to select a mirror from a menu. The command-line option '--mirror' requires an explicit URL of a Cygwin mirror site. Thereafter, within the GUI, the 'File' menu contains an option 'Make template' for generating a prototype package listing. A command-line version might resemble:

pmcyg --nogui --mirror http://NearbyMirrorLocation/pub/cygwin --generate-template mypackages.txt

This, and the equivalent GUI operation, will generate a text-file with every available Cygwin package listed, but commented-out with a '#' symbol at the start of each line. Removing the '#' at the start of any package's entry will prompt pmcyg to download that package when processing your file.

Updating package sets

After initially downloading a set of Cygwin packages using pmcyg, it is often useful to be able to perform updates without having to download all packages. pmcyg will automatically check whether the current version of each user-selected package is present, and only download files from the mirror site if they are not up to date.

It is also possible to arrange for pmcyg to delete old versions of packages that are no longer needed. By default, pmcyg will simply leave older packages in the local mirror directory tree. This is expected to have little adverse effect apart from consuming unnecessary storage space.

By using the --remove-outdated command-line option (or the corresponding button near the top-right of the GUI), you can arrange for superseded versions of packages to be deleted. Setting this flag to "yes" will remove all files in the local mirror that are not needed for the current package list. It is safer to set the flag to "ask", which will display a list of files that are to be deleted, and ask for confirmation before deletion.

To reduce the risk of setting remove-outdated to "yes" and deleting valuable files that have mistakenly been placed in the local mirror directory, pmcyg uses some very simple tests to try to identify when automatic deletion would be dangerous. In these circumstances it will behave as though the user had selected the "ask" setting. Naturally, these tests offer no guarantees that important files will not be deleted, so setting remove-outdated to "yes" is to be used with caution.

Cloning an existing Cygwin installation

If you already have a Cygwin setup that you would like to reproduce, pmcyg can construct a package list that can be used to create an off-line installer for the same set of packages. When pmcyg is run from within your Cygwin environment, you can use the '--generate-replica' command-line option or the 'Make replica' within the 'File' menu on the GUI.

Note, that this facility will only create a set of Cygwin packages necessary to create a similar installation. The actual packages downloaded may be different (probably later) versions, and any customization of configuration files will need to be performed manually.

If you get an error message of the form "unable to remap" when using this facility, you may need to run Cygwin's rebaseall utility.

Notes

"Cygwin" is a trademark of Red Hat Inc. There is no official connection between pmcyg and the 'Cygwin' product. pmcyg is supplied with NO WARRANTY and NO CLAIMS OF FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.