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I've noticed gross inconsistencies in the cygwin mirror sites. The packages that you get installed by default depend on which mirror you select. Even worse, some sites are missing important packages all together so you can't improve on the default installation.

My default installation of cygwin from sourceware.mirrors.tds.net did not include the diff or svn commands. When I went back to their mirror site (using setup.exe with the Internet option) the diffutils package and subversion packages were not even available at that site. The cygwin.mirrors.hoobly.com mirror had both of these packages, and based on the full listing it appears that it has a lot more packages that aren't available at sourceware.mirrors.tds.net.

Is there a cygwin mirror site that is authorative, or is it hit and miss on the cygwin mirror sites?

Getting the default and full cygwin releases versioned would go a long way to solving this problem, but cygwin doesn't version default or complete releases.

Dean Schulze
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    OMG I didn't even realize there were missing packages! I just assumed if it wasn't in the list, it wasn't ported yet. I liked cygwin.mirrors.hoobly.com because of the funny name (and it was at the top), but it doesn't even have PHP! `http://sourceware.org/cygwinports/` is a much more comprehensive list, but slow and you have to enter it manually. – Chloe Jan 30 '13 at 06:03
  • Comments can only be edited for 5m? WTF? As I was saying... You can also multi-select, and just select everything. – Chloe Jan 30 '13 at 06:09
  • Multi-select is bad -- if you do that, you will have a lot of duplicates (and possibly spend several weeks installing all of them -- assuming you get lucky and it all works -- if there is any overlap you could end up with a pretty corrupt installation!) – BrainSlugs83 Aug 30 '14 at 06:06

3 Answers3

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mirrors.kernel.org

user58670
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    Even now more than three years later this is still the answer... I recently tried several mirror sites before this one and they were all slow and missing packages. – Kenneth Oct 05 '12 at 02:57
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    That one doesn't have PHP, gretl, Sugar, etc. http://sourceware.org/cygwinports/ has twice as much, but slow and you have to set it up manually. – Chloe Jan 30 '13 at 06:22
  • doesn't work for me, cygwin gives errors when I try using it – Nate Aug 07 '14 at 00:44
  • It has PHP -- still does not have anything named "gretl", or "Sugar". -- Is there any source for this answer? On what basis is this mirror named to be authoritative? (Is this documented somewhere that you can link to for us, please?) – BrainSlugs83 Aug 30 '14 at 06:12
  • Just used this mirro, and was the fastest of them I tried – TryingToImprove Sep 22 '14 at 17:58
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    there are both FTP and HTTP mirrors. HTTP seems more stable. – steve cook Dec 02 '14 at 06:30
  • This works ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin/ – katta Nov 06 '16 at 17:33
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This shouldn't be much of a problem (anymore). Below the mirror list on this page it says that every mirror is automatically checked at regular intervals, and servers missing packages are temporarily dropped from the list. It also says that all mirrors should sync twice a day. I manually checked a number of mirrors just now, and they had all synced recently and seemed to have the same content.

Josh
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You probably want to look at this announcement from the mailing list, that came out today. It might explain the problems you've been seeing.

I recommend subscribing to the cygwin-announce mailing list if you use cygwin. You can subscribe at the bottom of this page.

That said, I have found kernel.org usually pretty good also.

Evan
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