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Comment by Maakuth | Hacker News Reader

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

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It would also be really nice if Cygwin did a quick ping on all of the package hosts and then ordered them in order of least latency relative to you. Oftentimes I have to re-start the install process because I accidentally chose a host that's slow enough to delay the install for hours.

I wish it would sort by network throughput instead of latency.

Babun provides an nice layer over cygwin (preinstalled oh-my-z and other goodies) along with an excellent package manager as well. https://github.com/babun/babun

Which is based on apt-cyg AFAIK. And I missed the the ``apt-get upgrade`` functionality in both pact/apt-cyg.

Indeed. It's kind of weird there's no package manager beyond setup.exe in Cygwin. There's even a port of rpm in the package collection. I wonder if Cygwin misses some bigger piece of functionality that is a requirement for rpm. Or maybe it's just good enough for most of use cases.

Problem with apt-cyg is the occasional need to "rebaseall" to keep the cygwin dll's happy. a proper package manager would be nice, though it is a good solution all things considered.

Couple apt-cyg with a batch script to install updates unattended - this made cygwin much nicer:

cd C:\distr\cygwin setup-x86_64.exe --no-desktop --no-shortcuts --no-startmenu --quiet-mode

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