[sword-devel] New website - installation instructions

[Greg Hellings]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 12:55 AM, Matthew Talbert <ransom1982 at 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.

>
> 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.

>
> 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.