I view Virtual Store as an abomination. I would hesitate to consider it a
feature.
Pacman out-of-the-box will insist on running as admin if the install is in
Vista Program Files. If you really want to, you could easily modify pacman
to bypass this check.
There are lots of problems with Virtual Store. It is not well or consistenly
behaved. I can write a file from J and it is there. But I can't see it from
a Command prompt window or from file explorer. Other users can't see it and
instead see the older version I though I had rewritten. Another user runs as
admin and erases a file, but I can see and use my Virtual Store version. I
can delete a file and the effect is to unveil an older copy. Etc. It just
isn't worth any supposed convenience.
And moreover, Virtual Store is stated by MS to be a temporary kludge to help
programs migrate to an eventual future where Program Files behaves normally
and requires admin permission to update.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sherlock, Ric" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Beta forum" <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 5:48 PM
Subject: RE: [Jbeta] jbeta available for Windows J32 and J64
---Eric Iverson wrote:
jbeta available for Windows J32 and J64.
*** Vista - Program Files - JAL ***
A pacman bug in previous releases allowed JAL updates on
Vista - Program
Files to update "Virtual Store". Pacman should have detected
that admin was
required and insisted that J be run as admin to do the
update. The test was
wrong and the update was allowed without admin. The update
looks as if it
worked and is usable. But the update is not done in the Program Files
folder. Instead it is done in:
\User\name\AppData\Local\Virtual Store\.......\j602
I'm in two minds about this.
In previous betas if an administrator wanted to make JAL addons
available to all users, then they could run J as an administrator, run
JAL pacman and install the required addon. The addon would install to
c:\Program Files\j602\addons\... . If a user (without admin rights)
wanted to install an addon, it would install to their virtual store, but
should be perfectly useable for them and would not affect any other
users.
The new beta behaviour will mean that non-admin users are not able to
install addons at all. I can imagine that this may be desired in some
situations where the idea is to control the users' J experience, however
it does that by decreasing functionality.
As I say, I'm in two minds as to which behaviour I would prefer. For my
general use the new behaviour will make life easier (I won't be able to
forget to run a new session of J as admin when installing addons), but
some flexibility has been lost for multi-user environments and I'm not
sure how important that might be for other users.
A compromise might be to warn users when running JAL pacman, that they
should run as Administrator if they want to make addons available to all
users, but let them continue if the choose to.
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