[Lazarus] Lazarus shortcuts conflict with windows shortcuts

[Jürgen Hestermann]

Am 2012-08-15 12:19, schrieb Reinier Olislagers:
 > So you removed your settings directory and were surprised your settings were gone???

1.) I thought my settings were stored in "D:\Programme\lazarus\environmentoptions.xml". "C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\<username>\Lokale Einstellungen\Anwendungsdaten" should not be used for such settings at all. Windows has "C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\<username>\Anwendungsdaten" for this but I changed this to the installation directory long ago.
2.) I *had* to delete it because I did not know any other way to get rid of the error message (I think it was something about lazbase not found or so). It took me even a while to find out that Lazarus has stored things in this directory too.


 > Saving settings in c:\documents and settings\<username>\... somewhere is the standard location for Windows (XP?) settings files, so it wasn't surprising to me that they were stored there.

See above.
1.) "Somewhere" should have been "C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\<username>\Anwendungsdaten" and not "C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\<username>\Lokale Einstellungen\Anwendungsdaten" (that's for scratch data only and is not save within our roaming profile at work for example).
2.) I changed Lazarus to not use this path (but it seems either this was skipped with some update or was ignored at all).


 > Apart from that, perhaps the release notes mentioned (see e.g. http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Category:Release_Notes) you had to change some settings?

I install snapshots very frequently. I don't look into any release notes for each setup. It seems this was a fault and I need to stay with a working installation as long as possible. So using snapshots is not wise. I will not do this again (never change a running system, though sometimes it was not running in parts).


 >> When updating I am also asked whether
 >> "D:\Programme\lazarus\environmentoptions.xml" (why is this file located
 >> in the installation directory?) should be updated.
 > Because it is the fallback file that will contain settings if you
 > haven't specified any.
 > (Secondary config path versus primary config path)

But that's totaly confusing for users if they are asked to overwrite this. If it's a fallback then it should be overwritten silently in the same way that all other files are overwritten too. I also mentioned that I configured Lazarus to save my settings in the installation direcory and not in "Dokumente und Einstellungen" so this message made me think that it will overwrite my settings. But as I now know, this was not the case. I consider this confusing.


 > Having multiple files does make it much easier to replace some of them
 > (e.g. editoroptions). As discussed in this and other threads, that makes
 > it useful for institutional use where some files can be replaced/updated
 > by centrally standardized files.

But it makes it harder to understand for the user and leads to such confusions


 > If you think these files are confusing and don't want have anything to
 > do with them, why is the number of files a problem? They're all stuck in
 > the config directory anyway...

Yes, but I was told that I need to configure my shortcut settings and now need to copy all these settings around to all my machines where I use Lazarus. A real pain.


 > Finally, you can edit your configs via Tools/Options... so why worry
 > about the amount of files etc?

Because I don't want to do that over and over again on multiple installations and I also want to have a backup of my settings which I can reinstall (either after data loss or on other machines).