[Lazarus] Lazarus config woes

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Sat, 02 Apr 2011 14:15:22 +0200
Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1 at aol.com> wrote:

> Mattias Gaertner schrieb:
> 
> >> BTW, my experiments indicate that putting an environmentoptions.xml into 
> >> the Lazarus directory (scp) will make the IDE use these settings, but 
> >> only if there exists no config in the default location. The full config 
> >> then is written back to the *default* location (pcp), not into the 
> >> Lazarus directory.
> > 
> > Yes, that's what I meant with used as template.
> 
> Okay, that explains a lot :-)
> 
> Remains to mention that the "template" term has to be explained to the 
> user. Normally a template is used to create *different* versions 
> (installations) from it, but Lazarus - by default - does it the opposite 
> way: templates are taken from an *installation*, and the result is put 
> into a *common* place.

It seems to me you misunderstood.
It is taken from the installation (e.g. under Linux the scp
is /etc/lazarus). The Windows installer puts the files into the Lazarus
directory, which can be a system wide directory, not writable for the
user.
And put into a user specific place. Under Linux this is ~/.lazarus,
under Windows it is GetAppConfigDir(False).

 
> This behaviour makes sense only because -pcp overwrites the *common* 
> place, so that effectively *no* place exists where common 
> (installation-independent) templates or settings can be stored :-(

Your information is outdated.
Please take a look at ide/include/win/lazbaseconf.inc. You can see that
only for fpc 2.2.0 the scp was the same as the pcp.

 
>[...]
> >> Why does the IDE store an updated config *always* in the default 
> >> directory, instead in the same directory from which (parts of) the 
> >> config have been loaded before?
> > 
> > If you want that you can set pcp and scp to the same directory.
> 
> That's not a solution of the problem, because then still no place 
> exists, where defaults could be stored - they are overwritten when 
> pcp=scp :-(

I can't follow you here. Maybe you are talking about a different kind of
"defaults"? The purpose of the scp is to provide defaults for the first
start of the IDE.


Mattias