After the third attempt at selecting what packages I want installed when installing Cygwin, the GNU (and other) tools for Windows, I gave up and set everything to install by category, in the process wasting lots of time installing dumb things I don’t need. While Cygwin itself is an awesome project, its installer could use the equivalent of Ubuntu’s meta-packages, like a “base tools” package or a “development” package, ones that ensure you’ve got a functional base instead of just installing by category. Off the top of my head, you could make a base package, an X11 client package, a LaTeX package, and a full Dev package, etc.

What am I using it for? Well, as well as being really handy for work, I want to make proper Windows MSI packages for a lot of the GTK/*nix libraries, so it’s more like how Windows developers expect libraries (ie a “Runtime” installer and an “SDK” Installer) I’m hoping that I can write a script to wrap “make install” so that the libs can be built automagically. D-Bus, Cairo, GTK+, Telepathy, all of those could be awesome in the hands of some capable Windows developers.