2009-10-26, 23:45
greybeard Wrote:I have been away for awhile, and it looks like you have made a lot of progress. With regard to the above quote, couldn't you use environment variables? I have not programmed in anything but C and have not programmed for Windows, but ENV variables might work. Anyone who would want portable installation is probably sophisticated enough to handle ENV variables. Many of us probably would want to have multiple versions running, so the ENV variables would probably need to carry the version number as well. This could be handled manually or at installation. Installer would ask "Portable or regular Windows install?" if it did not find a MEDIA_COMPANION ENV variable, else normal install. If portable also ask "Keep multiple portable versions?" in which case set version, ELSE just set MEDIA_COMPANION path.
Would something like that work?
I did have it working sort of in gen1, At first it was portable, but some people were encountering permissions errors within the standard Vista "Programs" folder.
As a result of this I started using these variables, with MC data being stored within a folder in the "application data" folder, this meant that MC could be put anywhere and would still work.
This set off the complaints of it no longer being as portable.
The fix was that if a user created a settings folder withing the MC folder then it would store everything in there and would remain portable.
This all worked very well, but is in my oppinion rather fiddly. I am thinking that in the future there may well be 2 builds of MC, one that is a simple archive, similar to what is available currently, and another one that uses some kind of installer, adding start menu shortcuts, etc.