Why Cygwin blew up my HD?

Question

I needed to use Cygwin in a single desktop machine.
I got the latest installation.
I chose the install from internet and chose a directory from the local file system as repository.
I selected only a couple of things: Devel, Shell and Utils.
I choose install and as I saw it downloaded all the packages and then started installing.
My problem is that even for this minimum installation, my HD went low on space (machine has already a lot of stuff and the repository folder was more than 1GB!)
I am planning to install to a new machine (aborted installation due to space) so I will do the installation in another machine instead of this (1 machine will have cygwin).
My question is, is there a way to avoid this? Should I choose as repository some network drive for example? Then after the installation is done, can I erase the packages in the repository?

Answer 1

Selecting the entire 'Devel', 'Shell', and 'Utils' categories does NOT result in a minimum installation. In particular, Devel contains chunky compilers/interpreters and runtime environments for numerous programming languages, and it also contains the development packages for many libraries, which in turn pull in the actual libraries.

If you want a slimline Cygwin install, go with the default install (which currently is about 20 MB to download and 80 MB installed), and only add packages you actually need. You can always run setup.exe again later to add more. Just in case this isn't obvious, you need to click on the '+' next to each category to see the packages within.

As an example, here are some of my essential add-ons:

• Shells: mintty
• Net: openssh, inetutils
• Utils: util-linux, diffutils, patch
• Editors: nano
• Devel: gcc4-g++, make, subversion

You can rely on dependency resolution to pull in any packages your selection depends on, e.g. gcc4-g++ also pulls in gcc core and binutils.

Answer 2

Yes, you should always make sure you have enough disk space to download something before you start. It's true that the Setup.exe GUI doesn't appear to summarize the space for you, but that just means you need to be more careful. Sysadmin can be tough job sometimes, like when you're given installers that don't use MSI format.

Is this a server? A production Windows server should have more than one volume, and you shouldn't be storing anything on C:\ that you don't have to. (PS - If this is a single desktop system, you should be asking this question over on SuperUser, not here. Read the FAQ if you're not sure why.)

If you're going to be installing Cygwin for multiple machines (servers or rolling out to multiple desktops), then it definitely makes sense to have a single network location to store this stuff rather than have the install files needlessly duplicated on all your servers.

You should not erase your local repository, especially if you're going to be using this for more than one machine.