Re: WIN2K/XP BUG & WISHLIST: Amaya user directory

Hello Charles,

On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 02:54:43PM -0500, Charles Allen wrote:
> 
> Amaya 7.2 is much better than 6.3 on Windows XP.
> 
> However there remains a major problem with the configuration and 
> installation.  It affects many users and should be simple to fix.
> 
> My amaya is using C:\AMAYA as it's user configuration 
> directory.  WHY!?  This will ruin any chance of using amaya with either 
> multiple users on one machine, or with network roaming user profiles.
> Actually, on the 'General Preferences' panel it shows 'C:\\amaya' for the 
> 'Amaya user directory'.  Why the double \\ ?

Following some requests on this list, the Amaya user directory for
NT, 2000, and XP architectures is now being stored at:

	$HOMEDRIVE:\$HOMEPATH\Amaya\config

This is documented in the Configuration help page (note that I have
a typo there and added two \\... cut and paste problem from the source
code).

Can you tell me if those environment variables exist in your 
box?

The double \\ seems to tell that you don't have a HOMEPATH environment
variable defined.

> INSTEAD, amaya should do what any good windows software does and use the 
> Windows environment variable APPDATA as the path to the parent directory of 
> the amaya user directory.  This works with Windows2000 and XP.
> 
> OR, if you want to read the registry there is an entry that works with 
> Win98 and WinME as well as Win2K and WinXP.  It should point to the same 
> place as the environment variable APPDATA:
> HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell 
> Folders : AppData
> 
> PLEASE make this single change to the next version of Amaya and I can 
> recommend it to the network administrators to add to their campus-wide lab 
> image.

The problem is that this is the third change we do to this code for
finding the Windows user home dir. It seems it's not always the same
even in the same architecture. Some of the solutions that were proposed
require a new system library. That is, all users would need to apply
a service pack on their boxes to be able to install Amaya if we used
functions from that library. This didn't sound reasonable to us.

I'm willing to change it again, but we need to make sure it's the
standard way. I've not found much documentation on this so far.

Ideas are welcome.

-jose

Received on Thursday, 20 February 2003 06:05:58 UTC