On Dec 19, 2008, at 2:08 AM, Greg Hellings wrote:
On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 12:55 AM, Matthew Talbert <ransom1...@gmail.com
> wrote:
SWORD plays fine on Windows if you point SWORD_PATH to where the
modules are installed. Handling whether they are writable by the
user
is a system administration issue, and should be left that way. The
only time when a user won't have write access to the Program Files
folder is when they are on a recent NT version of Windows, in which
case, ~/.sword notation works perfectly well to place the files in
C:\Users\<User name>\.sword
Our definitions of playing well are different.
Having a directory with "." at the beginning is not playing well.
There's nothing wrong with a "." at the beginning of a file or
variable name. It simply hides the folder from regular user view,
which is how it should be. The data in there is not intended for
direct user interactions. If people want to see hidden folders/files,
they can enable it.
Windows does not share this idea. A folder/file with a leading . is
not hidden.
Also, it isn't true that it is only recent versions do not allow
acces
to Program Files. Windows XP normal users can't write to Program
Files
(I just tested).
XP is still a recent version of the NT chain. It's still supported
and available on certain machines, and shares a significant amount of
user popularity - that's my meaning of recent. I don't know when in
the NT family the concept was introduced of the User directory, but I
know it's been in since at least XP. Not that it much matters,
because bending over backwards to support anything pre-XP is most of
the SWORD applications is going to be beyond tedious for minimal gain.
APPDATA, if I remember, goes back to Windows 98. But there it is C:
\Windows. Very ugly, but that was the standard back then.
I remember seeing a Microsoft document that explained all of this.
Also, sword supports the linux concept of having a shared directory
and a personal directory. Windows has this concept too, but it is
being ignored in favor of Program Files. This is not playing well.
Especially now that we are being told to ignore the correct way to do
things on Windows, and told we should agree to do the wrong thing.
From how I understood Troy, it was merely for the installation of
modules - not the creation of them - that he was advocating putting
them in Program Files. Per-user data should probably still be kept in
some sort of per-user location. But installing modules to be shared
across the front ends and users should be done in a more global place.
To date, I have found this to be problematic.
On Mac, this would be ~/Shared/Library/Application Support.
On Windows XP, I have not found a shared location that is by default
to be writable for non-admins.
On Unix, /usr/share/sword should be writable, but I have not found an
installer that makes it so.
Perhaps the path \Users\Public\Sword should be used for the regularly
installed modules, and set to SWORD_PATH, then a per-user folder in
%HOME%\AppData\Sword or %HOME%\.sword (as for not having "." at the
beginning of folders, I currently have .dvdcss, .housecall6.6, .kde
and .VirtualBox in my home directory -- it's definitely not unheard
of).
I don't remember if XP supports the \Users\Public, but I think it
does. I know that World of Warcraft, in a recent patch, decided that
it should recommend that users move the whole game folder to
\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft instead of \Program Files\World
of Warcraft. After all, that's what the public is for -- shared data
that users are allowed to read/write to. What to do on Windows
systems that are pre-user, I have no idea.
--Greg
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