Draft FC'00 Paper, please rip to shreads (or at least comment)

[Mark S. Miller]

At 02:32 PM 9/23/99 , Dan Moniz wrote:
>I'd like to take an in-depth look at the paper and I've been reveiwing
>the content at the URL you cited. Is the an ASCII plaintext copy of
>what you have so far could be made available?

I will make plain text available in parallel.  Expect an announcement 
soon.  Btw, just out of curiosity, why?

>Also, some of you on the list may remember me having some NT
>issues. I've since moved off of NT as my main development platform
>(well, I had anyways, but I was trying E in NT first), but I've modified
>the stock Setup.bat file in the Win32 distribution to better support
>NT.
>
>Now, I was never able to get the PIF files to work, however, elmer.bat
>and e.bat worked fine. So, this modified Setup.bat may not be of much
>use since all it does is install shortcuts to the e and elmer PIFs in
>the Start menu, but I thought it would be nice to have it around
>anyway:

Thanks Dan!

These raises two issues someone here might be able to help with:

1) What does it take to make a .pif work on NT?  If the answer is 
"nothing", why might these pifs not be working.

2) What should I "if" on in my .bat files so I can use Dan's logic on WinNT 
but the older logic on Win9x?.  Which should work in Win2000?  Is there a 
better way to handle this?

Closely related to #1: Is there any known way to generate a .pif from a 
program?  This would be necessary to write a real 
installer.  Alternatively, what are the Mozilla-compatible open-source 
install programs, whether or not they're Java specific, as long as they 
generate working .pifs?



-----------------------------------------------------------
Due to a bug (possibly at my ISP, but probably in Eudora 4.2.0.58), on 9/15
I lost 18 email messages.  If it's possible for you to check whether you
sent me something on that date, resending it would be great.  Otherwise,
please excuse my non-responsiveness to email you may have sent around that
time.  Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks.

         Cheers,
         --MarkM