Well, I've done Linux system administration for a good deal of time. I recently got a FreeBSD server, and instantly fell in love with the OS because of its package system. Basically, you have a "ports tree" which contains all the information you need to download and install a specific version of some program. If you wanted to install vim, you'd go into /usr/ports/editors/vim and enter "make install".
I wanted to do something similar. Instead of manually downloading a complete distribution, applying patches, etc., I was hoping to automate the entire process with a BSD-style script. The script would check its version number against the master's version, download and apply diffs as needed, and recompile whenever the user entered "make update". It could also check if the source tree doesn't exist at all, in which case it would simply download the latest version from the server. This way I could distribute the system by letting users download nothing but a tiny script. But of course such a system won't work if the development environment is Windows.
Trax: You could still use CVS, you'd just have to do an update after you run the script, to merge those changes into the repository. Once the format of the tree has been finalized, and I know there won't be any more database updates, I'll be moving most of this script over to use CVS.
Kas: Does cygwin come with 'ftp' and cvs support?
I develop under a Linux machine, then upload to my FreeBSD server. How different is the cygwin environment from a regular Linux environment, though?
|