Re: Installation on windows (fwd)

[David Ayers]

Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> While my feeling is that the two approaches are fairly evenly balanced
> (leaving aside distributed systems, and the fact that we have one system
> already working in the libraries, and consideration for the existing
> application codebase), I'd like to hear what other people think about the
> general prionciples.

FWIW, I believe that the "behind the back" handling (read: implicit 
conversions) of "\\" to "/" and allowing mixed representations which 
OPENSTEP for NT has (at least partially), caused us more pain than 
relief.  But this seem like an issue that cygwin and mingw must have 
also dealt with a lot and maybe we could get some input from there.

If I were to start from scratch I'd probably use the standard POSIX-like 
representation when dealing with paths yet have some helper 
methods/functions to explicitly convert NSStrings from/to specific 
alternative representations to deal with environment variables and such.

I think that supporting distributed systems (which happen not to be 
discussed here very much for varying reasons) are a very important 
factor for GNUstep in general and we should insure that can consistently 
handle such issues.

Cheers,
David