Re: GNUstep on Windows, "desktop" bundles...

[Alex Perez]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, David Ayers wrote:

> Alex Perez wrote:
> > Larry Cow wrote:
> > 
> >>Alex Perez a écrit :
> >>
> >>>IMHO GNUstep should be installed into C:\Program Files\GNUstep. People 
> >>>do not install it there because of the whole "space issue" but that 
> >>>space issue is rendered irrelevant because NTFS retains the old 8-char 
> >>>filenames. With this in mind, installing to C:\Progra~1\GNUstep is 
> >>>perfectly safe.
> >>> 
> >>>
> >>
> >>Yeah, it should work, but I can't help considering it a hack. But 
> >>anyway, the filesystem question is important, since we still don't know 
> >>how gnustep should see it. Should it see the root as Desktop? as user's 
> >>directory? as a special dir containing the different drives?
> > 
> > 
> > It's not really a hack...the first directory to ever be created in C:\ 
> > that starts with "progra" will always be suffixed with ~1. This 
> > compatibility can be harnessed to our advantage.
> > 
> 
> Note that these "standard directory" names for Windows are localized.
> Fortunately for German variants "Programme" would also resolve to
> PROGRA~1, but that seems like luck derived from the common roots of the
> word, which I doubt we'll have for every language windows supports.

An excellent point which I did not consider...there may be another more 
clean way of doing this though...there's an environment variable under 
2000 and XP called CommonProgramFiles which is set to C:\Program 
Files\Common Files...this would obviously have to be localized by windows 
to whatever c:\program files is set to. I do not think that the envvar is 
localized, and if that is indeed the case we could parse the path until 
the second backslash (striping off anything after C:\Program Files\) to 
get the localized directory. If we then install to the 8-character 
equivalent (it will always be the first 8 chars of whatever the localized 
version of the word "Program" is, with ~1 suffixed after the 8 chars)

I can't think of any corner cases where this wouldn't work...can any of 
you?