Re: Windows registry, Python, and LilyPond

[Helge Kruse]

Well, Microsoft has invented the side-by-side (SxS) installation years
ago. I has been introduced for Windows XP.
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa376307.aspx)

Although the name "assembly" suggests that it has to do with .NET CLR
it is a plain DLL thing suitable for native C applications.

While the SxS helps in the DLL hell you have to decide what program
shall execute schripts of a specific language. It's tedious to add a
hash-bang with the absolute path to the binary in front of any script
file. So you need a mechanism to connect the type of script to an
executable. That's done with the registry or even the PATH environment
variable.

When a program like python is already installed any change of the
second installer affect the previous python installation. To
circumvent the problem the installer would have to check if python is
installed and ask the user if she wants to change the executing
program (python) for the python scripts.

Helge

2013/9/12 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
> Hilary Snaden <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Nearly two years ago I wrote to this list commenting about major
>> problems (including registry residue) resulting from trying to run
>> Python 2, Python 3 and Lilypond on the same Windoze box.
>>
>> Since switching to GNU/Linux they've all got on just fine. Switching
>> to GNU/Linux is one of the best things I've ever done with a computer.
>
> To be fair: that's not an inherent advantage of either GNU or Linux.  It
> is more a consequence of how a distribution or file system standard
> organises the names and places of shared libraries and how a package
> system drops things into place.  Several different GNU/Linux systems do
> that differently, and several BSD variants have their own ways of doing
> things.  That's not remarkable but rather solid engineering.
>
> The surprising thing is rather that Microsoft has not managed to bring
> system management into a sane state for a single-vendor distribution,
> leading to everybody and his dog tampering with the system in the
> so-called DLL hell.
>
> --
> David Kastrup
>
>
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