[sword-devel] New website - installation instructions

[DM Smith]

On Dec 19, 2008, at 2:08 AM, Greg Hellings wrote:

> 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.

Windows does not share this idea. A folder/file with a leading . is  
not hidden.

>
>
>>
>> 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.

APPDATA, if I remember, goes back to Windows 98. But there it is C: 
\Windows. Very ugly, but that was the standard back then.

I remember seeing a Microsoft document that explained all of this.

>
>
>>
>> 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.
>
> From how I understood Troy, it was merely for the installation of
> modules - not the creation of them - that he was advocating putting
> them in Program Files.  Per-user data should probably still be kept in
> some sort of per-user location.  But installing modules to be shared
> across the front ends and users should be done in a more global place.

To date, I have found this to be problematic.

On Mac, this would be ~/Shared/Library/Application Support.
On Windows XP, I have not found a shared location that is by default  
to be writable for non-admins.
On Unix, /usr/share/sword should be writable, but I have not found an  
installer that makes it so.

>
> Perhaps the path \Users\Public\Sword should be used for the regularly
> installed modules, and set to SWORD_PATH, then a per-user folder in
> %HOME%\AppData\Sword or %HOME%\.sword (as for not having "." at the
> beginning of folders, I currently have .dvdcss, .housecall6.6, .kde
> and .VirtualBox in my home directory -- it's definitely not unheard
> of).
>
> I don't remember if XP supports the \Users\Public, but I think it
> does.  I know that World of Warcraft, in a recent patch, decided that
> it should recommend that users move the whole game folder to
> \Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft instead of \Program Files\World
> of Warcraft.  After all, that's what the public is for -- shared data
> that users are allowed to read/write to.  What to do on Windows
> systems that are pre-user, I have no idea.
>
> --Greg
>
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