Hi,
Mike Traum wrote:
Thomas,
I'm not sure what you mean by the user or administrator defining the
default installation.
They can make the registry entries point to the desired installation. The administrator can set the HKLM one as default, the user can override this in HKCU.
Maybe we should provide a tool to do this (or to clear an existing one that points to an old version).
This would be possible in linux/unix, but, from
what I've gathered, there's no way to do this in Windows. OOo 1.1.x
will always trump all other installations (unless there's something I
don't know).
If I understood this correctly, it doesn't, if you installed 1.1 with the /allusers option.
Even 2.0 and beyond, how could you do this if multiple versions were installed in system space?
Point the registry key at the one you want. Apparently default is the last one installed. If there is no single default installation on a machine you can't have it all resolved automatically.
As far as searching for all installations, in Windows it wouldn't be
too expensive to search for all of the registry keys, would it?
Might be possible. So you get (at most) two directories. How do you select the one the user wants? It is usual behavior to prefer HKCU over HKLM, to let the user customize their environment from the admin-provided default.
One of Thomas's points was that you can't easily tell which of two versions is 'better'. What should be chosen, if you have 'OpenOffice.org 2.0.3', 'StarOffice 7 PP4' and 'SomeOtherBrandedOffice 4.3.21'? IMHO neither the bootstrap nor your component would be able to make the 'best' choice automatically in all cases.
Under linux/unix, I agree that you wouldn't want to search the whole system. But, you could try to use 'locate', which is used by many (most?) non-server distributions. In general, it seems weird to be making calls to external programs, but I believe this is already being done in the Loader by calling 'which'. You could also easily search well known locations, such as those used when installing from rpm.
Looking toward the future, I think it would be prudent if OOo wrote a file (at least on unix/linux) stating what versions are available and where that are. Then, Loader could just read that. I think this used to exist as sversion.ini, but was removed. I assume it was removed because in theory you don't need this. But in practice, I think you really do.
The sversion.ini in 1.1.x pointed at the 'user installation'. I am not sure that there is/was a reliable way to find 'the' associated office installation - if it was only one...
Additionally, as soon as you have all-users and single-user installs, you are back at needing two files.
And finally, as indicated above, I am not sure that complete list would really solve your problem.
Ciao, Joerg
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