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Extra Cygwin packages


Extra Cygwin packages

I'm a big fan of Cygwin on Windoze to get the Unix/Linux look and feel. I can't stand the Windoze command prompt and their Power Shell is ridiculous. I don't want to get on another rant but I thought Power Shell was supposed to be their attempt at making Windoze more like Unix but it isn't. Yes, I have looked into WSL and it's ok but I'll stick with Cygwin.
One of the things I don't like about Cygwin is that their default list of packages just isn't enough for me. After I install it on a new system, I often find myself adding additional packages one-at-a-time when I discover I need them. I finally decided to be a little proactive and keep track of packages I had to install.

It looks like my beautiful formatting of this page has been trashed somehow and I apologize for that. I'll work on it.

My extra packages


Package Comments
git
Gotta have this!
pip2
Yes, I'm still a proud Python2 guy! And yes, I'm well aware they plan to drop support pretty soon.
bc
This is used by my qbc script
unzip
If I had my druthers, all archives would be tarballs but you have to deal with zip files sometimes too.
libffi-devel
For Python cryptography package, used by my SecureKeyValues script
gcc
For Python cryptography package, used by my SecureKeyValues script
python27-devel
For Python cryptography package, used by my SecureKeyValues script
ping
What's that you say? Isn't there a ping command in Cygwin? Well, no, not really. They don't include one by default, probably because there's one in Windoze. I kind of knew they weren't the same but I delved a little deeper and the divergence was too much to bear! I don't like the Windoze version because:
  • Its command line processing is brain-dead and will accept ping -n 1 host but not ping -n1 host!
  • Some of the options are completely different. The Windoze option to control the number of pings is -n but it's -c on Unix
  • The general default behavior is different. The default behavior on Windoze is to ping four times and quit whereas Unix will ping forever.
  • The Windows version has no --version option and only produces a reasonable help message because it doesn't understand --help!
Ugh. No. No no no! Shenanigans! Shenanigans, I say!
make
Useful enough to install without a specific need but I needed it to install the Python paramiko package
wget
Useful

Cygwin install history

I could rely on my memory for some things I installed but I discovered from a Cygwin FAQ page that /var/log has a log file with history that's useful: 

$ awk '{ if ($4 == "install") print $1 " " $2 " " $5 }' /var/log/setup.log
2019/08/13 16:11:57 base-cygwin
2019/08/13 16:11:57 cygwin
.
.
.
2019/08/13 16:11:57 openssh
2019/08/13 16:11:57 python2
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libbrotlicommon1
2019/08/14 09:19:23 perl_base
2019/08/14 09:19:23 rsync
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libgdbm6
2019/08/14 09:19:23 perl_autorebase
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libnghttp2_14
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libssh-common
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libunistring2
2019/08/14 09:19:23 publicsuffix-list-dafsa
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libssl1.0
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libbrotlidec1
2019/08/14 09:19:23 perl-TermReadKey
2019/08/14 09:19:23 perl-Error
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libgdbm_compat4
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libssh4
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libidn2_0
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libopenldap2_4_2
2019/08/14 09:19:23 perl
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libpsl5
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libsasl2_3
2019/08/14 09:19:23 perl-Scalar-List-Utils
2019/08/14 09:19:23 libcurl4
2019/08/14 09:19:23 git
2019/08/15 07:57:45 bc
2019/08/15 08:15:51 python27-setuptools
2019/08/15 08:15:51 python27-pip
2019/08/16 07:41:27 python27-pip
2019/08/16 07:41:27 unzip

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