At 12:31 PM 1/25/00 , Mark Shepard wrote:
>Okay, I tried installing 0.8.7 on NT (NT4SP5). The new Setup seems to work
>where it counts but (1) the default "Command Dir" of %systemroot%/command" is
>not correct for NT and (2) Setup.exe did crash once on me -- I suspect this
>was due to the fact that I had enabled the "SendTo Dir" installation option.
On #1, I'm having trouble figuring out what the right directory is. It seems it's "C:/Windows" on Win95/98 and "C:/WinNT/System32" on WinNT & Win2000. Is this right? Should I figure this out by switching on the OS? This would have the unpleasant advantage that I could refuse to install on versions of Windoze that I didn't know about. (When I sent my previous message, I had thought that "C:/Windows/System" was also on the Win95/98 PATH, but I was wrong.)
On #2, I'm very curious if this crash is reproducible. If so, I need to
figure out what's going on. Obviously, Setup shouldn't crash under any
reasonable conditions. Uninformative errors? Ok for now. Crashes? Bad.
>After the crash, the installation of E nevertheless seemed to work -- so
That's a great idea. I'll build some debug diagnostics into the next version of Setup.
>the crash must have occurred fairly late in the Setup procedure. I cleaned
>up the install and re-ran Setup leaving the SendTo, RootMenu, Desktop and
>Quick Launch options disabled and Setup worked fine.
>
>If you like you can send me a debug version of Setup and I'll try running it
>again to capture more debug information.
>OBTW, for these tests I used Sun's JDK1.1.8 and the swingall.jar from
>erights.org. I wasn't able to use Sun's Swing-1.1.1 package with E
>(though there are still configurations I haven't tried). E.exe would
>report "error setting L&F java.lang.ClassNotFoundException:
>javax.swing.UIManager" as soon as the first command was typed.
>Is there some trick to using E with JDK118 and Swing111?
I will investigate. I recall running into this problem as well. (I'm embarrassed to observe that I should have investigated then.)
> Mark Shepard
>
>Details on (1) - NT has no "Command" dir:
>
>Unlike Win9x, NT doesn't have a "Command" directory. The NT equivalent is
>the %SystemRoot%\System32 directory, which is where all of the Microsoft-
>supplied command line utilities reside (e.g., more.com, find.exe, sort.exe) and
>is also the dumping ground for Microsoft and third-party DLLs -- my System32
>contains 1,196 files :-)
So I had thought that I should use the result of getSystemDirectory(), which is probably C:\WinNT\System32 on WinNT/Win2000, and is C:\Windows\System in Win98/95. Unfortunately, the latter is not on the default path. Is there a corresponding dumping ground on Win98/95? Is there a version independent way to calculate the location of the dumping ground (so that we might have a chance of working on Microsoft's next gift to humanity as well)?
>Details on (2) - Setup crash:
>
>Here are details of the Setup.exe crash. Before running the 0.8.7 Setup, I
>renamed my existing 0.8.4 "c:\erights.org" and
>"Start Menu/Programs/erights.org" directories to get them out of harm's way.
Good idea.
>I then ran Setup.exe. Setup presented me with these default values:
>
> > E Install Dir c:/Program Files/erights.org/
> > Working Dir C:/NT/Profiles/shepard/Desktop
> > Menu Dir C:/NT/Profiles/shepard/Start Menu/Programs/erights.org
> > Command Dir C:/NT/Command
> > Bash Cmd Dir c:/usr/local/bin
> > No RootMenu Dir
> > No Desktop Dir
> > Quick Launch Dir C:/Windows/Application Data/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/Quick Launch
> > No SendTo Dir
>
>And after editing I arrived at these values:
>
> > E Install Dir c:/Program Files/erights.org
> > Working Dir c:/nt/profiles/All Users/Desktop
> > Menu Dir c:/nt/profiles/All Users/Start Menu/Programs/erights.org
> > Command Dir c:/nt/system32
> > Bash Cmd Dir c:/usr/local/bin
> > RootMenu Dir c:/nt/profiles/All Users/Start Menu
> > Desktop Dir c:/nt/profiles/All Users/Desktop
> > Quick Launch Dir C:/TEMP/e087/quick-launch
> > SendTo Dir c:/nt/profiles/default user
By doing this editing, you managed to fortuitously avoid the bug I reported as "The Slasher". Notice that your post-edit E Install Dir no longer has a terminal "/". (I mention this only for curiosity. The Slasher is already fixed in the sources.)
>Notice that the default Quick Launch directory, "c:/windows/Application
>Data/..." was incorrect on my NT system; I try to avoid IE, so my purpose in
>setting this directory to c:/temp/e087/quick-launch was merely to
>verify that the shortcuts were created.
I wasn't even aware that the quick launch bar was tied to IE. I figured it had "Internet Explorer" in the path only for some obscure historical reason.
What's the right thing for me to do here? A proposal: If the path I calculate doesn't exist, then this option is default off.
>I then gave the final confirmation to Setup, and it crashed during the install
>process:
>
> >----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>[... lots of hex-dump-level information that *really* makes you appreciate Java's stack traceback. ...]
> >----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Nevertheless it appeared that most of the Setup process had been correctly
>completed. Searching drive c:/ for e.lnk and elmer.lnk showed that Setup
>created {e,elmer} shortcuts in:
> c:/nt/profiles/all users/desktop (correct)
> c:/nt/profiles/all users/start menu (correct)
> c:/nt/profiles/all users/start menu/programs/erights.org (correct)
> c:/temp/e087/quick-launch/ (correct - dummy directory as a test)
>and that's it.
>
>Setup created c:\program files\erights.org and appears to have copied files
>correctly. Setup also copied e.exe to c:/nt/system32 and c:/usr/local/bin/
>correctly.
>
>Setup did not create shortcuts in any SendTo folder -- which is why I suspect
>the crash may be related to this. As far as I can tell, this was the only
>action Setup failed to perform correctly.
Any idea what might be special about the SendTo folder on WinNT?
Cheers,
--MarkM