Thomas,
For option (b), I wasn't proposing an automatic selection, unless, of
course, the Bootstrap was extended to be able to tell you what
services are available with each installation, or to be able to find
an installation which provides a certain service. This, in my opinon,
would be the best and most correct solution. However, it would also
most likely be the one which requires the most effort and, being
heavily involved in open source software development myself, I
realize the implications.
I was proposing that a client application would then be able to
present the available installations to the user, and the user would
be able to select which one would be used. The client app knows what
it needs, so it could prompt appropriately with something like
'Please choose the application you would like this client to access.
This client requires OOo 2.0 or above'.
Regarding option (a), I see this as a fair solution. However, your
everyday Windows user doesn't know how to change the value of a
registry key or even what the registry is. There definitely needs to
be a utility written for this (a gui one, accessible from the Start
menu), or an option during install that allows the person installing
to say that this is the default install. I think both, probably.
Thanks for listening,
Mike
--- Thomas Benisch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi Mike,
>
> Mike Traum wrote:
> > Thomas,
> > I'm not sure what you mean by the user or administrator defining
> the
> > default installation. 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). Even 2.0 and beyond, how could you do this if
> multiple
> > versions were installed in system space?
> >
> > 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?
> 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.
>
> just as a side remark, on the Unix/Linux platforms the UNO
> installation
> is found by using the which command only for those Java versions
> which
> don't support environment variables (e.g. Java 1.3.1, 1.4). For all
> other Java versions the UNO installation is found from the PATH
> environment variable, that means the first soffice symbolic link
> which is found in one of the directories in PATH is taken.
>
> > 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.
> >
> > Mike
>
> I think our discussion now really goes round in circles.
> Nevertheless in general there are two approaches:
>
> a) the user/administrator defines a default office on the system;
> this installation is used by the loader
>
> A default installation is defined by the following
> requirements:
> - Windows:
> The default installation is specified in the key
> "Software\OpenOffice.org\UNO\InstallPath" in
> HKEY_CURRENT_USER.
> If this key is missing, the same key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
> is taken.
> - Unix/Linux:
> A soffice symbolic link has to be created in one of the
> directories in the PATH environment variable.
>
> b) find all offices on the system, decide later which version
> should be taken
>
> You strongly favour b). The problem with b) is, how to select an
> office from a list of all offices on the system. Version numbers
> won't work. So what's your proposal for making a decision.
> In addition I doubt that one always finds all offices on the
> system. Sure, there's locate, there's which, there are rpms,
> there is pkgchck, there a default locations, but all this
> varies from system to system.
>
> We decided to go for a) and I don't really see any problems
> with it. You mentioned the problem with OOo 1.1.x which
> always writes to HKEY_CURRENT_USER. This is a bug and very
> unfortunate. I think this bug cannot be fixed in OOo 1.1.x
> but probably I'm wrong. Therefore I only see two solutions.
> Either you remove all OOo 1.1.x installations from the system
> or you delete the registry key in HKEY_CURRENT_USER.
>
> Thomas
>
>
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