Re: Unhelpful behaviour on Cygwin when "file" isn't installed

[Brian Dessent]

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

> > The user who reported this to me says that cygwin doesn't come with
> > file by default either (he'd installed it very recently, so I guess
> > he probably has the latest release).  I'm a little suprised by this,
> > but don't have cygwin myself so I can't check if this really is the
> > case.
> 
> Cygwin is very configurable.  So you can probably choose to (un)install
> file, independently of other choices.

Yes, 'file' is in its own individual package so it can be
selected/deselected at will.  However this package is not in the
category 'Base' which means if you just fire up the Cygwin setup utility
and accept the default set of packages it will not be installed.

However, the 'Base' category includes essentially no development tools
(gcc, binutils, make, perl, etc are absent) so it is not intended as a
functional starting point for anyone doing development.  On the other
hand, it would be very easy for someone to select the majority of
development tools and still neglect to install 'file'.  This is
exacerbated by the fact that it is in the category 'Utils' and not
'Devel' so even if you select all of 'Devel' you won't get it.

If libtool currently displays somewhat degraded or broken behavior
without 'file' then it would be a good idea to at least add 'file' to
this 'Devel' category in the Cygwin package DB.  This would be a rather
simple change and I don't think there would be much trouble getting it
done.

Brian