[Lazarus] Lazarus shortcuts conflict with windows shortcuts

[Reinier Olislagers]

On 15-8-2012 15:13, Jürgen Hestermann wrote:
> Am 2012-08-15 13:57, schrieb Reinier Olislagers:
>> On 15-8-2012 13:39, Jürgen Hestermann wrote:
>>> 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).
>> Do you have some Microsoft documentation link for that? If that location
>> makes sense, I'd submit a patch so you (and the rest of us) don't get
>> bitten by this again...
> 
> I only found this in
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_profile :
If you feel strongly about it, you might want to submit an issue in the
bugtracker...

>> I suppose that running the installer again will create shortcuts...
>> don't know if it overwrites existing ones.
>> Do you think the installer shouldn't overwrite existing shortcuts? What
>> if you change the install directory in your new installation?
> 
> Why are you talking about shortcuts? The shortcut simply starts
> lazarus.exe.
Yes. And you can use it to set the configuration path using
--primary-config-path=... or -pcp=...
In fact, it's the only way I know to change the configuration directory.

>> Hmm yes. You did read the warning on the snapshots page, did you?
> 
> Yes, of course. So it's forbidden to post anything for those people who
> use snapshots? It is not said so there.
Of course not. Just that if it breaks, don't act all surprised saying "I
did not expect this", "I want every upgrade from snapshot to snapshot to
work without breaking things" etc.

>> To counter this, what I do is have a "stable" version installed, which I
>> only rarely update.
> 
> I can't see any difference between "stable" and other versions. What
> makes a stable version stable? Interestingly, after major releases of
> software mostly a bug fix version is publish soon afterwards because
> suddenly many people start using the "stable" version and find bugs.
Ehm yes. I'll let you choose your own "stable" version.

The point was rather that you can have multiple versions side by side
that don't influence each other, allowing you to experiment with
bleeding edge stuff while you can always fall back on a known version.

>> Regardless, a user can customize that fallback environmentoptions.xml
>> and distribute it. That's why there's an overwrite question.
> 
> Yes, but if it is not used why ask and let the user believe that it is
> used? There are lots of other XML files in the installation path which
> seem to be overwritten silently when installing a snapshot. 
Never seen any evidence of silent overwrites.
The fallback environmentoptions.xml is used in some situation. I can't
help it you don't grasp the difference of primary versus secondary
config path... TBH it took me a while to catch on as well.
For discussion: perhaps this version could be renamed as
environmentoptionstemplate.xml or something?

>> Presumably, an installer could check to see what release the existing
>> Lazarus install was, if the previous environmentoptions.xml was
>> unchanged with regard to the file distributed with that install etc...
>> but that seems like a lot of work to me.
> 
> In general, under Windows path settings are stored in the registry so an
> installer could look for an existing installation and only ask when
> overwriting config files which are in use.  
1. I hope you realize by now Lazarus doesn't store its settings in the
registry. AFAIK, the only Lazarus-related things in the registry are the
file associations.
2. Talking about the environmentoptions.xml in the Lazarus directory,
how do you tell when "config files are in use" other than the method I
already described?

>> Do you really think having one humongous XML
>> file would clarify things? You'd still need to know about the XML schema
>> etc. anyway if you want to make meaningful changes.
> 
> I don't want to make changes within the file. I only want to copy
> settings (by copying the config file).
> I am looking at Lazarus as a solid standalone product like Delphi (which
> of course is not the case but I hoped that everything was bundled so
> that it looked like that). Therefore I would expect a single
> configuration file for everything except paths which should be in a
> second config file (or even better in the registry). I know that this is
> quite Windows centric but that's how Windows users would expect it.
> Other Windows software does it this way.
Ok, I see what you mean. I'd think having a cross platform config
capability using files is much more important, but perhaps the Windows
installer devs agree with you...