Cygwin Setup for distribution and yourself

Beating cygwin setup into submission can be a challenge. I finally figured it out.

I have need to install cygwin on servers which have no internet connection. I have no computer with internet except my lowly workstation. It already has cygwin installed. I would like to be able to download the cygwin installer, tell it to download only(it does support this) and then copy that package directory to a non-connected machine and run the cygwin installer.

The catch is that when I run the cygwin installer on my workstation, it sees all the packages I have installed. I can select a package for re-download, but then it downloads only that package and not all of its dependencies. I want a way to fetch everything! I actually suffered through an openssh cygwin bundle once. Adding a dependant package when I found it, trying again and so on, until after about 5 rounds, I had functioning openssh. It was a horrible experience.

It turns out the cygwin setup program reads setup information from /etc/setup. The simple workaround is to rename /etc/setup(aka c:\cygwin\etc\setup) do your download only install, and then delete the /etc/setup and rename your original back in place.

So far it works very well. You can even keep around multiple setup directories for different cygwin bundles.