Making GnuCash development on Windows easier, one step at the time

Geert Janssens janssens-geert at telenet.be
Sat Jan 19 09:31:10 EST 2013


On 18-01-13 22:25, Christian Stimming wrote:
> Am Freitag, 18. Januar 2013, 17:33:52 schrieb Geert Janssens:
>> I have written an experimental bootstrap script
> Excellent! That's great.
>
> In fact, I had to solve a very similar problem in another project, and ended
> up learning the crude syntax and limited commands of Windows' cmd.exe "shell".
> But VBS is surely much better suited for this task.
I originall started in Windows' cmd.exe "shell" as well, but quickly 
decided it would become very cumbersome. VBS isn't perfect either (eg. I 
haven't found a reliable way yet to capture/redirect output from sub 
processes) but it's at least much more flexible.
> I have a minor suggestion concerning the default location: With the newer
> Windows versions, users are strongly discourages to write anything into C:\ .
> Instead, at least in Windows 7 there is a true home directory, accessible via
> "%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%" . Maybe you should change the default location from
> C:\soft for those systems that have a %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% into
>
>   %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\soft
>
> or
>
>   %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\development
>
> The actual naming choice is up to you or whoever changes the code, but we
> should pick up the availability of the %HOMEPATH%.
These are very good suggestions, thanks. I quickly checked and both 
variables are available already in WinXP, so I can use them without any 
further Windows version checking.

On the other hand, using these variables will result in a base path 
containing spaces (at least on Windows XP), which until now is still 
explicitly discouraged in our guidelines for Windows GnuCash developers. 
So we risk opening a can of worms with this change. But now is as good a 
time as any to try and clean up that mess for once and for all.

I'll see what I can do.

Geert


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