gnupg windows installer

Jan-Oliver Wagner jan at intevation.de
Thu Jan 4 11:46:56 CET 2001


On Wed, Jan 03, 2001 at 05:03:11PM +0100, Werner Koch wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Jan-Oliver Wagner wrote:
> > forward slashes: gnupg must accept backslashes, because it is not
> > in our hand where a user decides to install gnupg.
> 
> It is a matter of the install program to use normal slashes for the
> "HomeDir" key.  That is trivial.

no, it is a matter of Windows. And the standard is backslashes there.
Users will get confused and it would take a hell lot of time
to explain them why gnupg does not like backslahes (in the end
they will still not understand why gnupg is so goatish).

And it is not trivial. Please have a look on the installer
(you don't need to install gnupg entirely, just run through the dialogs).

> > In that case HomeDir is D:\Programme\GnuPG
> 
> Yes it is, but you have to to enter "d:/Programme/GnuPG" for the
> field.

I regard it not feasible to force Windows users to do that.

> > Do you think it is a problem to have gnupg interpret
> > backslashes in the Registry entries?
> 
> Let the installer do this.  The format of "HomeDir" is a GnuPG
> property and the installer simply has to use the right stuff.

The installer starts with Windows-specific path names and just
adds GnuPG. Thus we automatically have Windows-style paths
in the registry variable.

The only way to enable the installer to replace path separators
after selection and before registry writing is to
modify InnoSetup. It is written in Delphi, a language I have
successfully avoided all my life :-)
I don't have a Compiler anyway.

> BTW, the GDK_PATH_SEPARATOR macro is an ugly and uneeded thing - it
> is better to let the file entryboxes change \ to /.  / is not a
> valid filename character under Windows but \ is one under Unix.
> Using backslashes in C is quite errorprone, so better avoid them
> where you can do it.

I am not sure why this all is a problem. Programs compiled
with gcc under Windows seem to have no problem with paths:
ls c:/gnupg/g*
works as well as
ls c:\gnupg\g*
and
ls c:\gnupg/g*

Seems that I must get into the gnupg source to learn more about
the problem (fortunately gnupg is written in C, one of my preferred
languages :-)

	Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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