[Lazarus] Lazarus shortcuts conflict with windows shortcuts

[Jürgen Hestermann]

Am 2012-08-15 16:03, schrieb Reinier Olislagers:
 >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_profile :
 > If you feel strongly about it, you might want to submit an issue in the
 > bugtracker...

It's not that I have a strong feeling about it but as you can see, this little inaccuracy can cause quite a lot of confusion (and data loss).


 >> 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.

That's the root cause of all this confusion: If I *know* all the nitty little details then I can act on them.
But if I only want to use a software I don't see the need to invest so much time into it.
If that's not possible the installer should show a warning with all the details the user has to know before he can use Lazarus.


 >>> 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.

The reason for breaking things was not that I used snapshots. The same would have happened for an official release. It is a kinda "design flaw".


 > 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.

Maybe. But I consider this a useless effort. If I see that a snapshot installation does not work anymore or breaks things (never happened yet) I would revert back and install an older version, if necessary after removing configs (if reinstallation alone does not fix it). It should be possible to get a clean installation somehow. The only problem was that I was not aware of all files and directories involved. Well, at least the *same* issue will not happen again. A hard way of learning though.


 > Never seen any evidence of silent overwrites.

Just have a look into the installation directory and search for XML files. They are all silently overwritten when installing Lazarus except environmentoptions.xml.


 > 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?

It seems that you miss the whole point. Tell me *any* reason to have multiple versions of the same (config) file? I can't think of any. If a file is not found and instead a new version needs to be used then it should be created in that situation (not before) and also the user should be informed about this. Then he can check what went wrong and he can to act on it accordingly. With your argumentation it would be a good idea to put a version of all config files in all directories found because in case another version is missing it can use some of the others. That's not very clever IMO and fools the user by letting him think that it is a file used by Lazarus (especially, because it exists in the installation directory).


 > 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.

Yes. But a good idea would be to store paths to the configuration file(s) in the registry and allow the user to (re)configure them in the Lazarus IDE. This would allow a (Windows) installer to detect a previous installation and (re)use config files (which the user may have adapted heavily). That would be user friendly (especially on Windows, where such a behaviour is common and expected). For Linux the registry could be skipped and the user here needs to take care about config files himself (which seems to be common for Linux).


 > 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?

I only expect one config file (for each purpose) and not many where all except one are dummies. Such a kind of software installation is very new and unexpected to me. So when I install Lazarus and it asks for overwriting a file named environmentoptions then I expect that it will be used. Otherwise:
1.) Why should it be created?
2.) Why does it ask for overwriting?