Re: Path issues on Win32

[Adam Fedor]

Stephen Brandon wrote:


> Personally I dislike the cygwin style //c/ and /cygwin/
> paths, because they rely so heavily on cygwin being there,
> and it gets really confusing at times to work out which
> utilities/apps will interpret them in the intended manner.
> That's why I have moved to using c:/ style paths in my
> GNUSTEP_*_ROOT env vars.
>
> In any case, I want the apps and programs I am working on to
> work on machines without cygwin - that's why I am using
> MinGW on top of cygwin, to remove the cygwin dependency.


That sounds great and more consistent. However, a lot of environment 
variables are used, for instance, to find/store resources - is there a 
Windows location that those could be stored? All the GNUSTEP environment 
variables are (or could be) available at compile time, so perhaps if the 
env varialbes aren't available at runtime, they could default to the 
compiled in values. Probably this should go in NSProcessInfo (i.e. it 
should have a list of env variables that must be set, setting them from 
compiled in values if necessary).


> $USERPROFILE could be checked first, and if non-existant,
> then $HOMEPATH and $HOMEDRIVE are used?


OK.


> (b) that absolute paths without drive letters should be made
> relative to either the current drive (ie look at current
> directory) or $SYSTEMDRIVE. Suggestions please?

Probably ok as a default. Although it depends on where you are most 
likely to get absolute paths w/o drive from. I'd imagine this is mostly 
from internal resources and could probably be fixed by being more 
careful about how we handle paths internally.

Can you tell me how you modified GNUstep.sh to use c:/ style but still 
set up the PATH correctly? I think that would help a lot if that was 
straightened out. Also you need to fix the def of GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT - I 
think that would fix the make_services problem you have.



--
Adam Fedor, Digital Optics            | Fudd's law of opposition: Push
fedor@doc.com  http://www.doc.com     | something hard enough, and it
fedor@gnu.org  http://www.gnustep.org | will fall over.